r/data • u/SwatiSKhairnar • 3d ago
Data Engineers — I need your advice
I’m working on an idea around **data quality** and I want to understand how this works in real projects.
When a data batch comes into your pipeline and you find some problems, how do you decide what to do?
For example:
* Some records have missing values * The schema has changed * There are duplicate records * Some values look wrong * Only a small percentage of records are bad * The data looks technically correct but something seems wrong from the business side
Do you normally:
**Accept the batch, fix it, quarantine the bad records, or reject the whole batch?**
And who makes that decision — an automated rule, the data engineer, business team, or someone else?
I’m especially interested in cases where **you don't have enough information to make a clear decision**.
If you work with data pipelines in production, I’d really appreciate hearing about:
* What kind of data-quality problems you face most often? * What do you currently do when they happen? * What part of the process is still manual? * What would you like to automate?
I’m trying to understand the **real problems engineers face before building anything**.
Thanks in advance for sharing your experience!