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Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Data Pipelines and Warehousing

Single source of truth

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

phraseCommon term

In data science & analytics, single source of truth means: One agreed place where a piece of data or a metric is stored and defined, so that everyone in a company works with the same numbers.

In Turkish: tek doğru kaynak, tek gerçeklik kaynağı

How it is used

Often shortened to SSOT. Data teams build a single source of truth so that sales and finance stop arguing about whose revenue figure is right. It usually means a warehouse table, a metrics layer or one official dashboard.

Example sentences

  1. The new revenue table is our single source of truth; please stop using the old spreadsheets.

  2. Without a single source of truth, every team brings different numbers to the meeting.

Common collocations

  • act as the single source of truth
  • build a single source of truth
  • SSOT
  • one version of the truth
  • data warehouseA central database designed for analysis that stores cleaned, structured data from many systems, such as sales, marketing and finance, often over many years.
  • metricA number that measures something specific about a product, business or process, such as daily sign-ups, average order value or page load time.
  • data sourceAny place that data comes from, such as a database, an app, a spreadsheet, a survey, an external API or a file sent by a partner.
  • data qualityHow accurate, complete, consistent and up to date data is, and therefore how far it can be trusted when people make decisions.

More terms: Data Pipelines and Warehousing

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