4 Steps of the Data Profiling Process

4 Steps of the Data Profiling Process
Farnaz Erfan

Data profiling helps organizations understand their data, identify issues and discrepancies, and improve data quality. It is an essential part of any data-related project and without it data quality could impact critical business decisions, customer trust, sales and financial opportunities. 

To get started, there are four main steps in building a complete and ongoing data profiling process:

  1. Data Collection
  2. Discovery & Analysis
  3. Documenting the Findings
  4. Data Quality Monitoring

We'll explore each of these steps in detail and discuss how they contribute to the overall goal of ensuring accurate and reliable data. Before we get started, let's remind ourself of what is data profiling.

What are the different kinds of data profiling?

Data profiling falls into three major categories: structure discovery, content discovery, and relationship discovery. While they all help in gaining more understanding of the data, the type of insights they provide are different:

 

Structure discovery analyzes that data is consistent, formatted correctly, and well structured. For example, if you have a ‘Date’ field, structure discovery helps you see the various patterns of dates (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY/DD/MM) so you can standardize your data into one format.

 

Structure discovery also examines simple and basic statistics in the data, for example, minimum and maximum values, means, medians, and standard deviations.

 

Content discovery looks more closely into the individual attributes and data values to check for data quality issues. This can help you find null values, empty fields, duplicates, incomplete values, outliers, and anomalies.

 

For example, if you are profiling address information, content discovery helps you see whether your ‘State’ field contains the two-letter abbreviation or the fully spelled out city names, both, or potentially some typos.

 

Content discovery can also be a way to validate databases with predefined rules. This process helps find ways to improve data quality by identifying instances where the data does not conform to predefined rules. For example, a transaction amount should never be less than $0.

 

Relationship discovery discovers how different datasets are related to each other. For example, key relationships between database tables, or lookup cells in a spreadsheet. Understanding relationships is most critical in designing a new database schema, a data warehouse, or an ETL flow that requires joining tables and data sets based on those key relationships.

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Data Observability
Data Quality

Leverages ML and statistical analysis to learn from the data and identify potential issues, and can also validate data against predefined rules

Uses predefined metrics from a known set of policies to understand the health of the data

Detects, investigates the root cause of issues, and helps remediate

Detects and helps remediate.

Examples: continuous monitoring, alerting on anomalies or drifts, and operationalizing the findings into data flows

Examples: data validation, data cleansing, data standardization

Low-code / no-code to accelerate time to value and lower cost

Ongoing maintenance, tweaking, and testing data quality rules adds to its costs

Enables both business and technical teams to participate in data quality and monitoring initiatives

Designed mainly for technical teams who can implement ETL workflows or open source data validation software

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