Understanding data profiling

If you have never heard of data profiling before starting this chapter, it is a comprehensive process that involves analyzing and examining data from various sources to gain insights into the structure, quality, and overall characteristics of a dataset. Let’s start by describing the main goals of data profiling.

Identifying goals of data profiling

Data profiling helps us understand the structure and quality of the data. As a result, we can get a better idea of the best way to organize the different datasets, identify potential data integration challenges, assess data quality, and identify and address issues that may affect the reliability and trustworthiness of the data.

Let’s deep dive into the three main goals of data profiling.

Data structure

One of the main goals of data profiling is to understand the data’s structure. This entails examining the data types, formats, and relationships between different data fields...