Data Profiling - A dip in the data

Data profile is an interesting task. if you love data, you would enjoy doing data profiling. As the name suggest data profiling is to profile or analyse the data. Analyse it's organization, type, amount and all other aspects which data can have. There could be various reason behind the profiling. Following are just to name a few:

1) To check that the data is suitable for other business requirements then one from where the data originated.
2) In case of migration from one system to another, it is an exercise to analyse the data if it is suitable for the target.
3) Profiling can result the information about its container, whether the database or file system is suitable enough to hold the information or it needs change.
4) To categorise the data to use it more effectively to make effective business decision.
5) Sometime profiling is required to check the quality of the data. Quality check of the data can yield wonderful results and could be beneficial for DSS and other interfaces.

During the analysis following aspects of the data can be considered:

Database/Business File
Business Table/File Name
Business Table/Element Name
Element Definition
Table Name/File Name
Column Name
Data Type
Data Length
Decimal Place
Valid Values
PK
FK
NULL Y/N
Element Required
Element Mandatory

Above aspects can be subdivided into logical and physical arrangement of the data. Following are some of the tools used in the industry to profile the data:

Infomatica Data Explorer
Taled Open profiler
Oracle Data Integrator
Datamartist
Datiris
pervasive Data Profiler

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