Top 10 Data Profiling Tools That Helps Ensure Data Quality

We are no longer impressed by gigabytes and terabytes. With a large amount of increased data around us, the tech industry is coming up with new words to describe data in new formats and sizes. It is impossible to measure and utilize the amount of data we generate every day.

Data must be cleaned, normalized, structured, and analyzed to use for decision-making. Data is available in many formats and not useful unless it becomes information. Data itself turned into a huge ecosystem of products, services, jobs, and talent. Big data and advanced analytics have helped businesses offer personalized, real-time services to their customers. A lot of tools are available in the market that helps data scientists collect, profile, clean, analyze, and visualize data.

In our previous article, we talked about the top 15 data mining tools. Here, we are covering the top 10 data profiling tools that are widely used to profile data. Data passes through various stages before it becomes information. Before we see popular tools for data profiling, let’s first see what data profiling is.

What Is Data Profiling?

Data profiling is the process of reviewing source data and creating informative summaries about that data. Data profiling is combined with the ETL process and is a part of data warehousing and data quality projects.

It involves:

• Gathering data types, patterns, uniqueness, variation, frequency, and length
• Collecting statistics and descriptive information
• Checking metadata and its accuracy
• Tagging data with keywords, categories, and labels
• Identifying dependencies, relationships, and structures
• Fine-tune ETL process and data conversion and migration
• Performing data quality assessment
• Assessing risk involved in data integration
• Understanding data challenges early to avoid problems
• Determining the accuracy, completeness, and validity of data

Data profiling generally refers to clarifying the structure, content, relationship, and derivation rules of the data. It helps better understand data, improve data quality, shorten the implementation cycle of projects, and discover business knowledge embedded in data itself.

It is an essential part of data management and can be done with various tools, techniques, and analyses. Here are the top data profiling tools that are widely used by developers and data professionals.

Top 10 Data Profiling Tools: Achieve Data Clarity, Validity, And Accuracy

• SAP BODS
• IBM InfoSphere
• Talend Open Profiler
• Melissa Data Profiler
• Informatica
• Atlan
• TIBCO Clarity
• OpenRefine
• Aggregate Profiler
• SAS DataFlux

SAP BODS:

SAP BODS stands for SAP Business Object Data Services. It is one of the popular data profiling and ETL tool used for data integration, data quality, data preprocessing, and data profiling. It consists of a GUI tool that allows users to create and monitor jobs that include taking data from various sources and perform complex transformations on the data. Important components of SAP BODS are Repository, Management Console, Job Server, Access Server, Metadata Reporting, and Designer.

It offers data management, data quality management, metadata management, and data profiling. It can be used for pattern distribution, data quality assessment, redundancy, dependencies, and so on.

SAP BODS is a one-stop solution for ETL, data integration, data processing, and data profiling.

IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer:

IBM InfoSphere Analyzer offers capabilities to profile and analyze data. It evaluates the content and structure of your data for quality and consistency. Users can improve data quality and accuracy by identifying anomalies and making inferences.

It is a component of the IBM InfoSphere Information Server and is used to understand the overall quality of data across heterogeneous systems. It also supports multi-level evaluations by rule record and pattern.

It helps identify data inconsistencies, anomalies, and redundancies. It was named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant For Data Quality Solutions.

Talend Open Profiler:

Data profiling is the first step for any data integration or data migration project. It is a part of Talend Open Studio which offers visibility, data quality management, and data integration. It is one of the most popular data profiling tools with powerful features and an intuitive user interface.

The key features of Talend Open Profiler include cleansing and managing data, analyzing key characteristics of text fields, and integrating data from multiple sources.

Gartner named Talend a leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. It lets you perform data quality analysis of different types of fields and also check for validation, redundancy, and consistency of data.

Melissa Data Profiler:

Melissa Data Profiler is used for data profiling and data quality management. It ensures consistent data quality by identifying key issues and conducting tasks such as content analysis, data standardization, ambiguities resolution, general formatting, field analysis, and monitoring. It helps enhance data governance and data warehousing efforts to drive better analytics and business intelligence across the enterprise.

Informatica:

Informatica’s data profiling solution, Data Explorer is available in two editions – Standard and Advanced. Informatica is a leading data integration platform offering various data-centric products and services. This tool gives you a complete and accurate picture of your data with powerful capabilities for quality, governance, and data profiling.

It works well with complex datasets and provides users with automated discovery capabilities. This helps organizations minimize the specification and testing cycles. It saves a lot of time and cost and lets organizations ensure data quality themselves.

Atlan:

Atlan is a data democratization company that helps teams collaborate effectively on data projects. It acts as a virtual hub for data assets and is used by a large number of enterprises to gather and manage data. Atlan data profiling involves collecting descriptive statistics, data types, identifying frequency distributions, and tagging data with classification, descriptions, or glossary terms.

Atlan lets users customize data quality reports as well as choose the kind of metrics to check for each column. Atlan helps organizations determine the accuracy, structure, quality, and completeness of data. Atlan offers modern data profiling solutions with powerful features and other data services.

TIBCO Clarity:

TIBCO Clarity is a data preparation tool that offers on-demand software services through the SaaS platform. You can use this software to discover, profile, cleanse, and standardize raw data gathered from different sources and offer good quality data management.

It detects data patterns and data types for auto metadata generation. By using this software, users can profile row and column data for uniqueness, variation, and completeness. It also discovers duplicate data by using the configurable fuzzy match algorithms. It works effectively with large datasets and offers validation, standardizing, transforming, cleansing, and visualization of data.

OpenRefine:

OpenRefine is an open-source desktop application with powerful features to work with complex and messy data. It was originally developed by Metaweb and then acquired by Google in 2010. It is similar to a spreadsheet application. OpenRefine is available as open-source since 2010 and is widely used for cleaning, transforming data to other formats, and data wrangling.

It looks like a spreadsheet but works like a relational database. OpenRefine lets you understand, clean, reconcile data and augment it with data from the web.

Aggregate Profiler:

Aggregate Profiler is a reliable and useful application designed for data analysis, data profiling, and data preparation solutions. It offers data filtering, profiling, similarity check, real-time alerting, anomaly discovery, data quality, reporting, and analysis.

It acts like an end-to-end data management platform offering powerful features such as pattern matching, case matching, basket analysis, metadata information, format matching, data discovery, data masking, and data preparation. It is developed by Arrah Technology.

SAS DataFlux:

SAS DataFlux helps organizations develop and execute comprehensive data management strategies. DataFlux Data Management Studio is a data management suite that offers data quality, data integration, and master data management solutions. It is used to have a consistent, accurate, and complete view of enterprise data. It is a powerful platform for metadata analysis, data profiling, data quality, address standardization, data monitoring, and integration.

It is widely used by companies to effectively manage data and establish data governance platforms.

Data Profiling Tools: Improve Quality of Data

Data profiling has proved to be one of the important processes before any data migration, conversion, and data warehousing projects. Tools for data profiling are not only used to profile data but also for various tasks such as data quality checks, data integration, and data transformation, and data quality assessment, and so on.

This article is written to provide you with popular data profiling tools. If there’s something you can add or we have missed out on any important tool, you can tell us via comments.