Data preparation is cleaning, structuring and enriching raw data into a desired output for analysis. It’s is commonly referred to as “janitorial work,” but is enormously important and mission critical to ensure robust, accurate downstream analytics. Properly conducted, data preparation gives you insights into the nature of your data that then allow you to ask better questions of it.
One of the biggest challenges with preparing data is that, historically, it has been very time-consuming. It has been widely publicized that up to 80% of the overall analysis process is spent cleaning or preparing data. As data has increased in size and complexity in recent years, however, data preparation has only grown more demanding and is often relegated to the organization’s most technical employees.
But when data preparation lives behind technical barriers, this presents new challenges: first, the organization’s most costly resources are tied down with preparing and unable to solve more challenging data problems. Second, business analysts, or those who know the data best, are unable get involved with the preparation process themselves. They lack the visibility into their raw data, which has the potential to transform their requirements and, ultimately, their analysis.
Self-Service Data Preparation
Self-service data preparation tools, such as Trifacta Wrangler, are solving these problems and carving out a new market with huge demand. By empowering non-technical users with the ability to wrangle data themselves, organizations can unlock huge value from their big data investments. Business units and organizations can spearhead their own initiatives, leveraging new data sources while maintaining the same resources on their team. Simultaneously, Wrangler accelerates the process, allowing businesses and organizations to arrive at insights faster.
Trifacta has an innovative approach to self-service data preparation, which we call “data wrangling.” Trifacta’s intuitive interface combines interactive exploration, or the ability to visually profile data, with predictive exploration, or suggested transformations that gain intelligence with each new click. What’s more, every transformation step defined by the user in Trifacta is logged and at execution time automatically compiles down into the appropriate processing framework. With Trifacta, data preparation is accessible, intuitive and scalable across the organization.
Download the 2018 Wisdom of Crowds Report on End-User Data Preparation to learn why Trifacta has been ranked as the #1 data preparation vendor threes years in a row.