Is the storage really the complex part? Isn't gathering the actual information and avoiding errors (ex: I have a co-worker who's name is incorrectly spelled three different ways in prod services) the hard part?
Data hygiene is a problem everywhere. Most companies I worked at just throw out 'bad data' and file a bug. Occasionally, if the data is a secondary source, it will be recreated from a primary source (assuming the primary source is still available).
In the particular case, your coworker would be stored by some identifier (like an SSN or similar) and their name would be stored as "aliases" and allow multiple names. I have two nicknames that I answer to, depending on when in my life you met me, and my family calls me by my proper name. Online, I go by several handles depending on whether I want the reader to be able to figure out my real name. I even used to work somewhere where I was called by this handle (withinboredom) more than my real name.
Is the storage really the complex part? Isn't gathering the actual information and avoiding errors (...) the hard part?
Not for someone that works in consulting, or at least it wasn't. I remember that I had Access access to the production database that stored all the customers, present and pass. They wouldn't give me a password to that, but apparently they thought it was safe to enter the password without me looking so I could try some queries and test my last fixes.
Not sure if it still works the same, but I did some dumb query, left the computer on and, next day morning, a temporal file was in my %TEMP% with a lot of data of millions of persons worldwide. Had I be so inclined, with an external hard disk I could have started my homegrown NSA project.
Now think of this: how many times have you heard that the data of millions of customers were on sale after a data breach? Do you doubt that, let's say, China has every single person in the West on file?
Our own governments have us legally or semi-legally (exchange) anyway.
