Data Profiling

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What Does Data Profiling Mean?

Data profiling is a technique used to examine data for different purposes like determining accuracy and completeness. This process examines a data source such as a database to uncover the erroneous areas in data organization. Deployment of this technique improves data quality.

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Data profiling is also referred to as data discovery.

Techopedia Explains Data Profiling

Data profiling is the method of examining the data available in a data source and collecting statistics and information about that data. Such statistics help to identify the use and data quality of metadata. This method is widely used in enterprise data warehousing.

Data profiling clarifies the structure, relationship, content and derivation rules of data, which aid in the understanding of anomalies within metadata. Data profiling uses different kinds of descriptive statistics including mean, minimum, maximum, percentile, frequency and other aggregates such as count and sum. The additional metadata information obtained during profiling is data type, length, discrete values, uniqueness and abstract type recognition.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.