I've worked for clients that had a large number of distinct, small to mid-sized projects, each interacting with each other via properly defined interfaces to share data, but not reading and writing to the same database. Each had their own separate database, their own cache, their own file servers/system that they had dedicated access to, and so they never caused any problems. One of these clients is a mobile content vendor, so they're lucky in a way that they do not have to face the same problems that everyday business applications do. They can create all those separate compartments where their components happily live in isolation of the others.

However, for many business applications, this is not possible. I've worked with a few clients, one of whose applications I am doing the production support for, where there are "bad data issues" on an hourly basis. Yeah, it's that crazy. Some data records from one of the instances (lower than production, of course) would have been run a couple of weeks ago, and caused some other user's data to get corrupted. And then, a data script will have to be written to fix this issue. And I've seen this happening so much with this client that I have to ask.

I've seen this happening at a moderate rate with other clients, but this one just seems to be out of order.

If you're working with business applications that share a large amount of data by reading and writing to/from the same database, are "bad data issues" that common in your environment?