First of all, full disclosure, if you haven’t already noticed, this blog is written by a software company that makes a pretty cool data profiling tool. We’ve just released our new version V1.3.0, so obviously we can’t pretend to be completely objective in the “should you data profile debate”. But bear with me, because I think I’m still going to be able to convince you it’s a good idea, regardless of which tool you select.

The way I think of data profiling is that it is the “Reality check” of all your data activities.

The data model is the theory.

Data profiling lets you see reality.

The bottom line is that you know what is supposed to be in the column by looking at the data model, but you can know what is actually in the column by data profiling the data.

For a fantastic detailed look at data profiling, check out this series of blog posts from Jim Harris, over at obsessive compulsive data quality. It’s a great series that clearly communicates the type of analysis that might be done while doing data profiling and the kind of detective work it sometimes takes. While I’ll be looking at a number of the same concepts in this series of blog posts, being a software vendor, I won’t be as tool agnostic as Jim was- we’ll be demonstrating the techniques using the Datamartist tool.

You can download a free trial of the Datamartist tool and try the profiling techniques and features yourself as you follow along.

We hope you enjoy the upcoming data profiling tutorials and that you give the Datamartist data profiler and transformer serious consideration for your data profiling needs.