# What is data freshness? Definition and Examples | Silicon

URL: https://meetsilicon.com/glossary/data-freshness/

> Data freshness is how recently the data behind a table, metric or dashboard was updated, compared with how recent it needs to be.

A daily finance report is fresh if it reflects yesterday. A live operations dashboard may need data from the last few minutes. Freshness is always relative to an expectation.
## How freshness is measured
Most teams compare the latest timestamp in a table, such as the newest loaded_at value, with the time now, and set a threshold per table. dbt source freshness checks do exactly this and warn or fail when a source is older than its threshold.
## Common causes of stale data
A sync job fails or is paused, a scheduled dbt run errors partway through, an upstream vendor delays an export, or a dashboard caches results longer than intended. Each of these leaves the dashboard loading normally, which is why stale data is easy to miss.
## How Silicon handles it
Scheduled reports in Silicon run fresh queries at send time instead of sending cached results, and Autopilot flags content that has gone stale.
FAQ
## Data freshness questions
### What is a good data freshness SLA? +
It depends on the decision the data supports. Daily is common for finance and leadership reporting. Operations teams often need data within the hour.
### Is data freshness the same as data latency? +
They are related. Latency is how long data takes to move from source to warehouse. Freshness is how old the data is when someone looks at it.
## Related
- Dashboard reliability ->
- Data observability ->
- A practical guide to data freshness ->
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