Data Discovery Process
When you begin a data integration project, profiling is often the first step. You can create profiles to analyze the content, quality, and structure of data sources. As a part of the profiling process, you discover the metadata of data sources.
You use different profiles for different types of data analysis, such as a column profile, primary key discovery, foreign key discovery, and data domain discovery. You uncover and document data quality issues. Complete the following tasks to perform data discovery:
- 1. Find and analyze the content of data in the data sources. Includes data types, value frequency, pattern frequency, and data statistics, such as minimum value and maximum value.
- 2. Discover the structure of data. Includes keys, functional dependencies, and foreign keys.
- 3. Review and validate profile results.
- 4. Drill down on profile results.
- 5. Curate profile results.
- 6. Create reference data.
- 7. Document data issues.
- 8. Create and run rules.
- 9. Create scorecards to monitor data quality.
You can use the following tools to manage the discovery process:
- Informatica Administrator
- Manage users, groups, privileges, and roles. You can administer the Analyst service and manage permissions for projects and objects in Informatica Analyst. You can control the access permissions in Informatica Developer using this tool.
- Informatica Developer
- Create and run profiles in this tool to find and analyze the metadata of one or more data sources including discovering the relationships between columns. You create profiles using a wizard.
- Informatica Analyst
- You can run a column profile, perform data domain discovery, and perform enterprise discovery on data objects in the Analyst tool. After you run a profile, you can drill down on data rows in a data source.