What is Data Profiling?

Data profiling represents a comprehensive process of examining, cleansing, and analyzing an existing data source to generate actionable and valuable summaries. Proper techniques of data profiling verify the accuracy and validity of data, leading to better data-driven decision making that customers can use to their advantage.

The process helps identify data quality issues, redundancies, anomalies that may arise without data ingestion best practices. It produces critical insights into data that companies can then leverage to their advantage.

The need for profiling will continue to grow in step with the proliferation of the amount of data and data-driven initiatives in business. Data is transferred from on-premises locations to cloud-based warehouses using a variety of data ingestion patterns. During data ingestion, which is the process through which data is moved into a database for storage or usage, size and complexity of data can cause problems.

This is a key technique to ensure accuracy from source to target. Techniques used rely upon analytical algorithms that examine data sets in great detail.

WHY USE IT?

Data profiling generates insights into your data, examining its format, quality and relationship to existing data. It can alert you when data sets are incomplete, duplicated or contain anomalous patterns. It also reveals patterns and inconsistencies in data, as well as ranges, the mean and medium for a data set — painting a reliable picture of your data. When you trust your data quality, you can be confident that your insights reflect an accurate business landscape.

DATA PROFILING AND SNOWFLAKE

Data profiling can be implemented in a variety of cases where data quality is important.

Snowflake’s collaboration with Talend ensures that when migrating legacy data to Snowflake’s built-for-the-cloud data warehouse, data is accurate and complete.

Snowflake architecture is compatible with many data profiling tools that identify and correct data quality issues proactively, preventing future complications. Start your free trial today.