The Data Quality Test: 10 Questions That Predict Pipeline Disasters

I’ve been writing about data quality a lot lately. Enough that I notice myself doing it. Enough that a small voice says: haven’t you made this point already? Schema drift, NULL propagation, duplicate records, the whole catalogue of things that go wrong in the space between a source system and a warehouse. I keep circling back to it. And every time, I almost talk myself out of writing the piece. Then I reflect on what’s happened in the last few years of work. The postmortems I’ve read, the pipelines I’ve inherited — and the same pattern shows up with depressing regularity. Not exotic failures. Not edge cases. The boring stuff. The questions nobody asked before the first row hit the warehouse.