What Is Data Profiling? Steps and Types of Data Profiling

Data Profiling is the analysis of source data to determine how it is structured, what it contains, and how it interacts with other data, as well as the identification of projects that could benefit from it.

Data Profiling Procedures

Step 1: Conduct data profiling at the beginning of a project to establish if the data is suitable for analysis and if the project should continue.

Step 2: Before putting the source data into the target database, identify and resolve any quality concerns with the source data.

Step 3: As the data moves from source to destination, look for data quality issues that can be fixed using Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). Profiling data can tell whether additional manual processing is necessary.

Step 4: Use unexpected business rules, hierarchical structures, and relationships between foreign keys and private keys to refine the ETL process in step four.

Data Profiling Types

Content Discovery: An individual data record is inspected for flaws during content discovery. Discovering problematic rows and systemic issues in the data can be done through content discovery (for example, phone numbers with no area code).

Structure Discovery: In addition to performing mathematical checks on the data, data validation involves checking for consistency and correct formatting (e.g. sum, minimum or maximum). For example, the number of phone numbers that are wrongly formatted can be determined by using structure discovery.

Relationship Discovery: When two or more pieces of data are linked together, it is known as "relationship discovery." For example, the links between database tables or the references between cells or tables in a spreadsheet are examples of important connections. In order to effectively reuse data, it is necessary to have a firm grasp on the underlying relationships between the various data sources.

Conclusion

As part of a data strategy, data profiling is essential since it provides a framework from which to build quality criteria for monitoring and cleansing your data. Data profiling is the first step in the process of gaining access to trustworthy information, and it is an essential part of the process.

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