What is Data Profiling?

Data Profiling is one of the principles of Data Management. Data Profiling is the activity to find patterns in Data. Data profiling is performed by teams that have access to some data sets for different use cases such as Data patterns discovery, high level analysis, data exception handling for ETL etc. Data profiling is the first part of the Data Quality life cycle within the Data Governance methodology. Running Data profiling on data sets can answer simple questions such as how many nulls in the dataset, what are the different patterns of dates in the dataset etc. Profiling is typically done on the subset of data. Tools have limit on the amount of the row in the data set it can profile. These tools can also create visualization on the profiling results for easy understanding of the patterns.