May 12 2010
BI Fail…
I got an email yesterday (May 11th, 2010) with the following information about a customer loyalty program coupon that I had earned:
Notice the date? The coupon is supposed to expire on April 12, 2010.
I got the email on May 11, 2010.
See the problem?
After a brief phone call with Best Buy, it turns out the coupon date is actually Dec 12th. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what the actual report failure was. A clue: there is nothing wrong with the data. 😉
If the coupon was “suppose to” expire on 12-4 it’s a simple MM/DD transposition. Database format might have been MMDDYYYY prog read it as DDMMYYYY.
12-12 … not so sure
Or a business rule should have been set up comparing the expiry date and the current date, and returning an error if the gap between the 2 dates is less than n days…
It was strictly a formatting issue. The date was December 4th, but written as 12-4. The format used was DD-Mon instead of MM-DD, thus the “4” got converted to April, and it looked like the coupon was sent out expired. 🙂
As I said, it wasn’t a data issue at all. In this case the data was correct but the date format mask was wrong. If the date had been December 25th the error would have likely been caught, since there is no 25th month…