Data Discovery
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: Market Update
This is the first of four Market Updates on data discovery, data profiling, data cleansing and matching, and data quality platforms respectively. Since data discovery is a new market sector we need to make a distinction between it and data profiling. We define data discovery or, more correctly, data relationship discovery, as “the discovery of relationships between data elements, regardless of where the data is stored”. Data profiling tools do this but they also perform statistical analysis against data sources for such things as the number of null values that are specifically designed to assist data cleansing processes. Conversely, there are data discovery tools that are not data profiling tools.