Data Profiling for Beginners with Talend Open Profiler: Data Quality Tutorial

Author: Dylan Jones, Community Leader - Data Quality Pro

Published: October 2, 2008

Editorial Categories: [DA.1] Data Quality Product Tutorials, [TB.1] Data Profiling and Data Quality Assessment

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Data profiling and data quality assessment are some of the most important techniques in the data quality management process.

The ability to understand your data and assess its fitness to support the business services your organisation executes is paramount.

In this feature we show you how to create a data profiling process by creating a tutorial that combines:

• Free database, free data profiling tool and free pattern analysis tools from Oracle, Talend and Data Quality Pro
• A sample data set in various formats from a real life property database
• A full 21 page tutorial with step-by-step instructions and worked examples that are suitable for all abilities

What does this data profiling tutorial cover?

The focus on the tutorial is to introduce you to some of the basic techniques and tools that are required to build your own data profiling strategy.

Structured approach to data quality

Data profiling is really about building a set of well managed and controlled data quality rules as part of a structured data quality management programme.

This allows your organisation to constantly assess business data and alert your data quality custodians of potential danger points caused by defects.

Free data quality tools

By using the freeTalend Open Profiler, the freely downloadable version of Oracle and our own data quality pattern analyser, any member of Data Quality Pro can now create and monitor a wide variety of data quality rules for their own live data.

Multiple benefits

In addition, data profiling is one of the first steps for any data integration or data migration project so members of our sister community Data Migration Pro will also reap great benefits of following this tutorial if they do not yet have a profiling solution in place.

Download this free data profiling tutorial

To access the tutorial just follow these simple 3 steps:

• Log in to the Data Quality Pro community (not registered yet - register here (for free) in less than 60 seconds)
• Download Data Profiling Tutorial: Talend Open Profiler (L1) 
• Open the zip file and follow the instructions enclosed to install the various components

NOTE: You will need ideally an Oracle or MySQL, DB2, SQL Server database to use the Talend Open Data Profiler. I believe all of these database formats can be downloaded and Oracle/MySQL download instructions are provided in the tutorial.