Catalog Administrator Guide > Registering Unknown Data Types for Profile Run > Overview
  

Overview

When you enable data discovery and run a resource, the profiling scanner excludes the columns with unknown data types, such as user-defined data types, and runs the profile on the remaining source columns that have supported data types. The excluded columns do not appear in the profiling results. To mitigate this issue for relational sources, you can register the unknown data type as varchar data type. After you register the data type, the profiling scanner uses the registered data type when you run the resource.
You can map the data types for relational data sources such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Teradata. You cannot register BLOB, CLOB, image, and binary data types in the XML file. You cannot register custom data types in the Oracle data source.

Example

In the Customer table of a Microsoft SQL Server data source, you concatenate the FirstName and LastName columns to create a new column named CustomerFullName. You configure a user-defined data type named user_name for the column CustomerFullName. You want to run the column profile on the Customer table. When you run the resource, the profiling scanner excludes the CustomerFullName column as the column has a user-defined data type. To resolve this issue, you can register the user_name data type as varchar data type.
To register the unknown data type, perform the following steps:
  1. 1. Navigate to the <Enterprise_Data_Catalog Installation Directory>/services/CatalogService/ScannerBinaries location in the Enterprise Data Catalog installation directory.
  2. 2. Unzip the catalogMapping.zip file. The zip file contains a sample catalog-mapping.xml file.
  3. 3. In the catalog-mapping.xml file, enter the source attribute as user_name and target attribute as varchar.
    4. The following code snippet shows the changes that you need to make to the file:
    <ColumnDataTypes>
    <!--<item source="CustomerFullName" target="varchar"/>-->
    </ColumnDataTypes>
  4. 4. Zip the file as catalogMapping.zip.
  5. 5. Upload the file to the <Enterprise_Data_Catalog Installation Directory>/services/CatalogService/ScannerBinaries location.
  6. 6. Navigate to the <Enterprise_Data_Catalog Installation Directory>/.../CatalogService/ ScannerBinaries/CustomDeployer/ location.
  7. 7. In the scannerDeployer.xml file, enter the following code snippet:
    8. <ExecutionContextProperty isLocationProperty="true"
    dependencyToUnpack="catalogMapping.zip">
    <PropertyName>CATALOG_MAPPING_LOC</PropertyName>
    <PropertyValue>scanner_agents/profileMapping</PropertyValue>
    </ExecutionContextProperty>
  8. 8. Save the file.
  9. 9. In Informatica Administrator, recycle the Catalog Service.
  10. 10. In the Catalog Administrator, run the resource.
The profiling scanner uses the varchar data type for the column CustomerFullName during profile run.