Learn More About Data Preparation Software
Why use data preparation solutions?
In the early days of analytics, a small team would be responsible for manually preparing data — managing quality assurance for an entire company’s database, and pulling together actionable insights. This is still the case for thousands of organizations across multiple industries. As technology advances, the volume of unstructured data has grown immensely. People generate more data than businesses know what to do with, creating a unique and unprecedented challenge for data science experts and executives trying to make sense of the analytics. Data prep technology was created out of this growing necessity, with the ability to pick through massive amounts of unstructured data and present only the data points that matter for a given scenario. This relieves IT specialists of this strenuous task and makes an impossible amount of data more digestible.
In addition to finding, profiling, and combining data based on user specifications, certain solutions in this category assist with data transformation or converting data types into different forms or structures for analysis purposes. This creates a unified view of the most relevant analytics for convenient analysis and eventual exporting into external systems. Just as the amount of data has increased in recent years, so has the variety of data types, formats, and sources. Data preparation platforms work to identify or profile the most valuable data across these various types and deliver it in the most useful way for each new scenario. These advanced tools can save employees time while creating opportunities with previously unattainable data, especially if a business has an extensive portfolio of data sources.
Features of data preparation software solutions
The robust tools in this software category offer a diverse range of functionalities related to the process of data preparation. The following are some prominent features of these unique offerings.
Workflow scheduling and monitoring — Depending on the intended use of these tools, employees may want to map out an automated query to prepare certain groupings of data regularly. This might involve a custom data flow builder or a similar user interface for customization. Using these tools, administrators can adjust the specific details of each workflow, including analytics filters, which sources to pull from, and the schedule for executing the query. A company may be able to adjust other components of the process, such as validation details and the destination for exporting finished data sets. Dashboards on some tools can help display analytics related to data prep workflows, including general efficiency and results summaries.
As a company creates data prep queries, whether for one-off events or routine workflows, a company may be able to configure the data blending and joining process as it relates to each function. Data blending is another common term used to describe the merging of analytics from separate sets into a cohesive group to draw conclusions and continued analysis. When configuring the intelligent algorithms on these platforms, companies can specify how they want the data joined together and presented, for instance, which data type they prefer and how the data should be ordered. Whether called data preparation, data wrangling, or data blending, the solutions in this category can assist with this increasingly popular business strategy to help bring divergent analytics together for a unified purpose.
Data profiling — Once the intended analytics are pulled and organized using these tools, certain platforms can assess the data and help determine the additional purposes it can be used for. This is also known as data profiling. Some tools in this category offer more powerful profiling features than others, allowing for rich analytics and summaries about prepared data sets as they are constructed. If data profiling features are not present, a company might assign certain data analysts or other specialists to profile the finished data sets and determine the best course of action to take as the results are delivered.
