{"id":6156,"date":"2023-09-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessyield.com\/tech\/?p=6156"},"modified":"2023-09-03T18:34:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T18:34:51","slug":"data-profiling-what-it-is-tools-best-practices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessyield.com\/tech\/technology\/data-profiling-what-it-is-tools-best-practices\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Profiling: What It Is, Tools & Best Practices","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Data profiling, or data archeology, is the process of reviewing and cleansing data to better understand its structure and maintain data quality standards within an organization.<\/span> It is the process of examining, analyzing, and creating useful summaries of data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The process of data mining yields a high-level overview that aids in the discovery of data quality issues, risks, and overall trends. Data profiling produces critical insights into data that companies can then leverage to their advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling is the process of reviewing source data, and understanding structure, content, and interrelationships. It also identifies the potential for data projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling evaluates data based on factors such as accuracy, consistency, and timeliness to show if the data lacks consistency or accuracy or has null values. A result could be something as simple as statistics, such as numbers or values in the form of a column, depending on the data set. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling is a crucial part of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Specifically, data profiling sifts through data to determine its legitimacy and quality. Analytical algorithms detect dataset characteristics such as mean, minimum, maximum, percentile, and frequency to examine data in minute detail. It then performs analyses to uncover metadata, including frequency distributions, key relationships, foreign key candidates, and functional dependencies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, it uses all of this information to expose how those factors align with your business\u2019s standards and goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling can eliminate costly errors that are common in customer databases. These errors include null values (unknown or missing values), and values that should not be included. This also includes values with unusually high or low frequency, values that don\u2019t follow expected patterns, and values outside the normal range.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are three main types of data profiling:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This looks into individual data records to discover errors. Content discovery identifies which specific rows in a table contain problems, and which systemic issues occur in the data (for example, phone numbers with no area code).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This discovers how parts of the data are interrelated. For example, the key relationships between database tables, and the references between cells or tables in a spreadsheet. Understanding relationships is crucial to reusing data; related data sources should be united into one or imported in a way that preserves important relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Validating that data is consistent and formatted correctly, and performing mathematical checks on the data (e.g. sum, minimum or maximum). Structure discovery helps understand how well data is structured\u2014for example, what percentage of phone numbers do not have the correct number of digits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ralph Kimball, a data warehouse architecture expert, suggests a four-step process for data profiling:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bad data can cost businesses 30% or more of their revenue<\/a>. For most companies, that means millions of dollars wasted, strategies recalculated, and tarnished reputations. And often, the culprit is oversight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Companies can become so busy collecting data and managing operations that they compromise on the efficacy and quality of data. That could mean lost productivity, missed sales opportunities, and missed chances to improve the bottom line. That is where a data profiling tool comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once a data profiling application is engaged, it continually analyzes, cleans, and updates data in order to provide critical insights that are available right from your laptop. Specifically, data profiling provides:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once data has been analyzed, the application can help eliminate duplications or anomalies. It can determine useful information that could affect business choices, identify quality problems that exist within an organization\u2019s system, and be used to draw certain conclusions about the future health of a company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most databases interact with a diverse set of data that could include blogs, social media, and other big data markets. Profiling can trace back to the original data source and ensure proper encryption for safety. A data profiler can then analyze those different databases, source applications, or tables, and ensure that the data meets standard statistical measures and specific business rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding the relationship between available data, missing data, and required data helps an organization chart its future strategy and determine long-term goals. Access to a data profiling application can streamline these efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Profiled information can be used to stop small mistakes from becoming big problems. It can also reveal possible outcomes for new scenarios. Data profiling helps create an accurate snapshot of a company\u2019s health to better inform the decision-making process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling can help quickly identify and address problems, often before they arise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling challenges typically stem from the complexity of the work involved. More specifically, you can expect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling can become very complex when trying to implement a successful program due to the sheer volume of data collected by a typical organization. This can become a very expensive and time-consuming task to hire trained experts to analyze the results and then make decisions without the correct tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to start the data profiling process a company needs its data all in one place, which is often not the case. If the data lives across different departments and there is no trained data professional in place, it can become very difficult to data profile a company as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While there is overlap with data mining<\/a>, data profiling has a different goal in mind. What is the difference?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, data profiling is the first of the tools you use to ensure the data is accurate and there are no inaccuracies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Basic data profiling techniques:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Advanced data profiling techniques:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling, a tedious and labor-intensive activity, can be automated with tools, to make huge data projects more feasible. These are essential to your data analytics stack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Key features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Data quality features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Key features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Key features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Key features include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With the enormous amount of data available today, companies sometimes get overwhelmed by all the information they\u2019ve collected. As a result, they fail to take full advantage of their data, and its value and usefulness diminish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Data profiling organizes and manages big data to unlock its full potential and deliver powerful insights. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With almost 14,000 locations, Domino\u2019s was already the largest pizza company in the world by 2015. But when the company launched its AnyWare ordering system<\/a>, it suddenly faced an avalanche of data. Users could now place orders through virtually any type of device or app, including smartwatches, TVs, car entertainment systems, and social media platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That meant Domino\u2019s had data coming at it from all sides. And, by putting reliable data profiling to work, Domino\u2019s now collects and analyzes data from all of the company\u2019s point of sales systems in order to streamline analysis and improve data quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, Domino\u2019s has gained deeper insights into its customer base, enhanced its fraud detection processes, boosted operational efficiency, and increased sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Office Depot combines an online presence with continued, offline strategies. Integration of data is crucial, combining information from three channels: the offline catalog, the online website, and customer call centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among other things, Office Depot uses data profiling to perform checks and quality control on data before it is entered into the company\u2019s data lake. Integrated online and offline data results in a complete 360-degree view of customers. It also provides high-quality data to back-office functions throughout the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Globe Telecom provides connectivity services to more than 94.2 million mobile subscribers and 2 million home broadband customers in the Philippines. Opportunities to expand market share are limited, so it was vital that Globe get a better understanding of its existing customer base so it could grow the lifetime value of each relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To deliver the customer insights the business required, Globe needed data that was healthy and suitable for applications such as data analytics. However, this proved to be a challenge in areas like data scoring, which at that point was manually addressed by using spreadsheets and offline databases to apply validation and data quality rules to existing data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Globe operates a center of excellence for its data that encompasses data quality, data engineering, and data governance. With healthy data, Globe improved the availability of data quality scores from once a month to every day, increased trusted email addresses by 400%, and achieved higher ROI per marketing campaign. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Metrics include a 30% cost reduction per lead, a 13% improvement in conversion rates, and an 80% increase in click-through rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBasics of Data Profiling<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Types of data profiling<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Content discovery<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Relationship discovery<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Structure discovery<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Data profiling steps<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Benefits of data profiling<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Better data quality and credibility<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Organized sorting<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Predictive decision making<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Proactive crisis management<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Challenges of Data Profiling<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Expensive and time-consuming<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Inadequate resources<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Data profiling vs. data mining<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Data profiling and data quality analysis best practices<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Data profiling tools: Open source and commercial<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Open-source data profiling tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
1. Aggregate Profiler<\/a> (Open Source Data Quality and Profiling)<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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2. Quadient DataCleaner<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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3. Talend Open Studio<\/a> (a suite of open-source tools) <\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Commercial data profiling tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Data Profiling in Informatica<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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5. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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6. SAS DataFlux<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Data profiling in action<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Domino\u2019s data avalanche<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Data quality for customer loyalty<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Higher customer lifetime value with healthy data<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Recommended Articles<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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References<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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