Data Profiling for Beginners - download a complete tutorial including free software to start your own data profiling initiative
Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 4:17AM in DQ Techniques, Personal Development, Technology, Tutorial, mp-month by Dylan Jones (Founder) 
Data profiling has to be one 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 tutorial we show you how to create a data profiling process by providing:
- Free database platform, 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 for all abilities
What does the 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
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 tools
By using the free Talend 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 the tutorial
To access the tutorial just follow these simple steps:
- First visit our Download Centre, click here.
- Then just navigate to the Tutorials folder and you will see "Data Profiling for Beginners", just click on the file to download it to your local directory
- Unzip the file and read the Instructions PDF file for further instructions
- Contact us if you have any issues with the tutorial, we're happy to help
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.
We will be providing a range of further data profiling tutorials in the coming weeks and also getting our other members to submit their tips and techniques on data profiling best practice so make sure you grab our RSS feed and stay tuned:
Useful links
- DQ QuickLink – Find other articles and topics of interest on profiling, data quality rules etc.
- Create an online DQ management repository – Create a custom web tool for managing your entire data quality initiative more effectively
- MIKE2.0 – Learn new profiling techniques from the open source platform for data professionals
- FREE Data quality pattern analyser for Oracle courtesy of Data Quality Pro
- FREE Data quality pattern analyser for Microsoft Access, courtesy of Data Quality Pro
Reader Comments (1)
Talend really has some interesting software. The tutorial you have on the site is also very interesting and I learnt a lot with it. Thank you for this page.