Strategy: Maintaining a Relational vs. Flat File Marketing Database

Housing Database, Updates

Maintaining a database in-house requires a lot of time and resources. If there are any software or hardware updates, have them maintained. Service bureaus can manage the updates, training and changes to the database for a fixed amount every month. It’s difficult, however, to match up an internal database used for data maintenance and storage to an outsourced database. Different factors are used when creating both, as well as different software and logic to update and maintain each one. I recommend that a relational database be updated monthly, or at the very least, quarterly. Keep the data current.