How Metadata Profiling Fuels Data Governance

What is Metadata Profiling?

Imagine taking an X-ray of your data. Metadata profiling is like that, analyzing the structure, content, quality, and usage patterns within your data sets. It examines details like data types, values, formats, and relationships. Tracing inconsistencies in the metadata through lineage sheds light on data inconsistencies. For example: when the metadata for a field is defined to be 50 bytes long, but the application or process consuming this data has a definition that’s only 30 bytes long. This could forewarn about potential data truncation, which becomes a Data Quality issue. This sheds light on your data assets, empowering informed decision making.

Data vs. Metadata Profiling: A Complementary Duo

Data profiling dives deep into the actual data content, revealing its quality, structure, patterns, and anomalies. Metadata profiling, on the other hand, focuses solely on the “data about data,” without touching production data. It offers a key advantage: non-intrusiveness. Profiling only metadata avoids impacting production systems and bypasses internal hurdles related to access.

The Synergy of Metadata Profiling and Active Metadata

Both practices are crucial for data management and governance. However, they address different stages of the metadata lifecycle. Active metadata refers to dynamic, interconnected metadata actively updated and contextualized throughout its lifespan, providing real-time visibility, control, and automation.

While some overlap exists, the focus differs:

• Metadata profiling: Examines attributes like data types, formats, relationships, constraints, lineage, and semantics.
• Active metadata: Focuses on actively using, updating, and integrating metadata into data management, analytics workflows, and decision-making processes.

Orion Governance: Your Comprehensive Metadata Profiling Solution

Orion Governance’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) offers the most powerful metadata profiling within a self-defined data fabric. Here’s how it empowers you:

• Automatic Metadata Harvesting: EIIG gathers metadata from over 70 technology sources, encompassing DBMSs, files, ETL tools, BI reporting tools, and applications including data profiling tools. It then intelligently stitches this information into a knowledge graph, providing a comprehensive overview EIIG produces both horizontal lineage and vertical/business lineage automatically. Key technologies include Java, Python, Mainframe (JCL/COBOL, IMS, PL1).
• Data Quality on Autopilot: EIIG incorporates key data quality metrics, continuously assessing data elements for completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and relevance. This proactive approach helps identify inconsistencies, errors, and missing values before they impact decisions. EIIG also assigns quality scores and monitor changes, offering real-time insights.
• Optimize Data Workflows and Usage: By understanding how metadata is used within your organization (data access patterns, consumption, queries, reports, etc.), EIIG helps optimize data workflows and improve accessibility and usability.
• Uncover Relationship for Informed Decisions: EIIG shows horizontal dependencies (source to target) and unveils vertical connections (business views). This empowers you to trace data origins, conduct impact analysis, ensure data quality, propagate trust, and find the right data faster.
• Enriched Metadata for Context and Clarity: As EIIG profiles metadata, it enhances it with additional information like business glossaries, classifications, ownership, and security policies. This enriched metadata provides context, enabling stakeholders to better understand and manage data assets.
• Actionable Insights at Your Fingertips: EIIG visualizes metadata profiling findings and insights in a knowledge graph, reports, and dashboards. This information is also integrated into its dynamic data catalog, providing a centralized source for informed decision-making.

Unlock the Potential of Your Data

By leveraging metadata profiling with EIIG, you can:

• Maintain data quality
• Proactively identify and address data issues
• Ensure data governance and compliance
• Facilitate collaboration among data stakeholders
• Ultimately, make better data-driven decisions.

Take control of your data and unlock its full potential with EIIG!

Ready to see EIIG in action? Schedule a free demo today.

About the Author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development at Orion Governance, Inc. Connect with Niu on LinkedIn.