No matter their size, all organizations rely heavily on the data they collect and manage. This data ranges from customer information to sales records, employee performance, and more. However, if this data is inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete, it becomes more of a liability than an asset, making it more important to measure its health. To do so, they need data quality metrics relevant to their specific needs. Organizations use data quality metrics, also called data quality measurement metrics, to assess the different aspects, or dimensions, of data quality within a data system and measure the data quality against predefined standards and requirements. What is Data Quality? Data quality measures the data’s ability to meet the criteria for completeness, accuracy, validity, uniqueness, timeliness, and fitness for purpose. Data that meets the requirements set by the organization is considered high-quality—it serves its intended purpose and helps in informed decision-making. For instance, high-quality data in a healthcare system consists of precise and up-to-date patient records comprising patient demographics, medical history, diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. Such a detailed dataset is maintained by trained data quality analysts, which is important for better decision-making and patient care. These professionals conduct data quality assessments by individually assessing each data quality metric and estimating overall data health. The aggregate provides the organizations with a certain percentage to define the accuracy of data. What are Data Quality Metrics? Data quality metrics are specific indicators used to evaluate how good or bad a data set is. In other words, whether the data set is fit for purpose. As part of data quality management, these metrics help quantify the state of data using specific criteria that are objectively defined and applied. For example, you can set up particular data quality metrics to measure the percentage of incomplete records, count the number of incorrect entries, or determine the proportion of duplicate data. Why is there a need for data quality measurement metrics? Data quality metrics are not just a technical concern; they directly impact a business’s bottom line. Gartner reports that organizations lose an average of $12.9 million annually due to low-quality data. Furthermore: 41% of data warehouse projects are unsuccessful, primarily because of insufficient data quality. 67% of marketing managers believe poor data quality negatively impacts customer satisfaction. Due to low data quality, companies can lose 8% to 12% of their revenues. Make Decisions Based on Data You Can Trust With LIKE.TG Ensure accuracy, reliability, and completeness of your data using LIKE.TG's advanced profiling tools. Start you 14-days-trial now! Now, to mitigate the consequences of poor-quality data, there needs to be something that quantifies the current state of data, and to do that, you need data quality metrics. These metrics evaluate data in four key dimensions: Intrinsic: Focuses on the data’s credibility, objectivity, and reputation. Contextual: Emphasizes the relevance, timeliness, and completeness of data. Representational: Focuses on the formatting and presentation of the data. Accessibility: Deals with the ease of access to the data. These data quality dimensions are essential to a data quality framework and help ensure data is well-rounded and reliable. Using data quality metrics, you can set targeted objectives to guide your teams in addressing commonly occurring data quality issues. 7 Data Quality Metrics to Track Data quality metrics can vary depending on the sector and the data’s intended use. However, certain metrics are commonly adopted across many industries for their fundamental importance in assessing data health. Here are some frequently used data quality metrics examples: Completeness Ratio It refers to the extent to which a data set contains all the required or expected data elements. The completeness ratio measures the proportion of complete data entries compared to the total number of expected entries within the data set. This ratio helps us understand whether the data is complete and contains all the necessary information to draw correct conclusions. For instance, a customer database requires customer information such as name, address, email, and phone number for each customer. If the database contains one or more missing fields, we would have a lower completeness ratio, indicative of lower data quality. Similarly, a high completeness ratio indicates complete data records useful for analysis. Costs of Data Storage Sometimes, data storage costs keep rising while the amount of usable data remains the same. It happens due to redundancy, duplications, and inconsistencies within datasets and is a sign of poor-quality data. Unhealthy data also complicates the backup and recovery processes, as finding and restoring accurate data becomes challenging in the event of data loss.Conversely, if your data operations remain constant but you observe a fall in data storage costs, it’s likely your data is of high quality. Ratio of Data to Errors The error ratio is a measure to determine the percentage of incorrect records in a dataset compared to the total number of records. The error ratio helps you identify problem areas by providing a percentage of flawed data. To calculate the error ratio, you divide the number of records with errors by the total number of records in your data set. Suppose you have a list of 1000 addresses, and 100 of them contain errors such as wrong zip codes or misspelled city names. The error ratio would be 100/1000, which equals 0.10 or 10%. This result means that 10% of your address data is incorrect. Timeliness Index This data quality metric assesses how quickly data is collected, processed, and available for use. To do so, it looks at the time elapsed between an event’s occurrence and its data’s availability. For instance, if you need certain data ready within every 30 minutes, and it does, that data will be considered timely. A higher timeliness index indicates that data is readily accessible and up to date. Similarly, a lower timeliness index suggests inefficiencies or delays in data delivery or availability. Amounts of Dark Data Dark data refers to the data that an organization collects, processes, and stores but does not use for any purpose. Not all large amounts of data that organizations collect qualify as dark data. It becomes “dark” primarily because it is not actively used or managed. Dark data can become a data quality problem because; It can contain outdated or inaccurate information, impacting the overall accuracy and reliability of your company’s data sets. It often includes unprotected sensitive information, exposing risk to data breaches. Dark data does not necessarily imply poor data quality but can indicate areas where data quality could be compromised. Consistency Score Another data quality metric to keep track of is the consistency of data, which refers to its uniformity and coherence across various sources, systems, and time periods. The consistency score can be measured by setting a threshold that indicates the amount of difference that can exist between two datasets. If the information matches, it is said to be consistent. Typically, robust data integration strategies are employed to remove any inconsistencies in multiple data systems. Duplication Rate It measures the proportion of duplicate entries or records within a dataset. It confirms whether the given information in a dataset is unique and appears once only. Duplication can be present in datasets containing customer data but can be removed. Data deduplication tools and algorithms identify and remove duplicate records from the dataset. The tools compare entries based on predefined criteria, such as similarity thresholds. They then merge or remove the duplicates accordingly. How to Effectively Use Data Quality Metrics? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to data quality measurement metrics; they depend on your business’s aims, where your data comes from, and the rules you follow. Understanding these factors is the key to using data quality metrics effectively. Here is how you can use these metrics to their best. Understand your Content Requirements Data Model To effectively implement data quality metrics, you need a clear understanding of what your data should look like and how it should behave — these are your “content requirements.” Alongside your content requirements you need a “data model,” essentially a blueprint of how your data is structured and relates within your database or data system. This model helps ensure that your data metrics are tailored to how your data is organized. Define Your Data Quality Dimensions Define data quality dimensions strategicallyso that you can use the most relevant data quality metrics to monitor data health. It allows you to employ a targeted approach that enhances the reliability and usefulness of your data. For example, when analyzing financial transactions, prioritizing data quality dimensions like accuracy and consistency ensures that the data is uniform and correct. Alternatively, if you are managing a marketing campaign, prioritizing the completeness and relevance of customer data enables you to tweak your messaging effectively. As you refine these key dimensions, you will see clear improvements in your metrics, such as higher data accuracy and greater completeness, depending on your focus areas. Set Clear Goals for Your Data Quality Metrics Setting realistic data quality goals can improve your metrics’ overall performance. For example, suppose you want to ensure your customer information is almost always complete. Setting a target range based on your goals and industry standards, such as having no more than 3% of your data incomplete, establishes clear expectations and ties your data quality metrics to specific outcomes, such as improving a user’s shopping experience. Moreover, documenting particular use cases can help your teams realize the importance of aligning data quality with business goals and demonstrate how these metrics fit into your broader business strategy. Regularly Monitor Your Data Quality Metrics Keep a close eye on your data quality metrics and update them as needed. Continuing with the example of setting a target range or number, if, after monitoring, you discover that your customer data shows more than 3% missing values—higher than your set target—you should evaluate further to identify the underlying problems. While the initial reaction might be to reevaluate your entire data management strategies, examining more specific and immediately relevant factors is recommended. Issues such as data entry errors or flaws in data collection methods are often the culprits and should be addressed before considering broader strategic changes. Conclusion While managing data quality can be challenging as it costs companies a lot of time and money, it can be improved using key data quality metrics. These metrics provide a clear, quantifiable way to assess and enhance data accuracy, consistency, and reliability. Integrating a comprehensive tool like LIKE.TG can be particularly effective to enhance these efforts further. LIKE.TG enhances data management by offering features such as automated data cleansing transformations, customizable data quality rules, and thorough data profiling and validation, ensuring that data meets quality standards and is managed efficiently at scale. Start with a 14-day free trial and experience how LIKE.TG can transform your data quality management today.

The global big data analytics market is projected to reach a $655.53 billion valuation by 2029, compared to $241 billion in 2021. This massive growth shows how enterprises are increasingly turning to data analytics to guide various business operations. As part of this shift, enterprises rely heavily on Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)processes for turning raw data into actionable insights. These processes are a key component in data warehousing and facilitate data movement between different organizational systems, increasing data accessibility. Various ETL tools are available today, written in different languages such as Java, Apache Hadoop, and JavaScript. However, ETL with Python — a general-purpose and high-level programming language — is among the leading choices. This blog discusses what makes Python a great option for building an ETL pipeline, how you can set it up, and the best Python ETL tools and a better, no-code data integration alternative. Python ETL Tools: An Overview The phrase ‘Python ETL tools’ doesn’t refer to a single, monolithic software program. Rather, it’s a catch-all term for numerous libraries and frameworks built using Python for targeting different stages of the ETL process. These stages and their corresponding Python ETL tools are listed below: Workflow Management Tools In Python ETL, workflow management helps you schedule engineering and maintenance processes. Workflow applications such as Apache Airflow and Luigi, while not designed explicitly for ETL processes, can help you execute them through the following features: Dependency Management: By defining task dependencies, you can ensure that tasks are executed in the correct sequence. This is crucial for data integration processes where extraction must precede transformation, which in turn must precede loading. Scheduling: Scheduling ETL tasks lets you run them at defined intervals or specific times, which automates the process and ensures the availability of timely updates. Parallel Execution: Workflow management tools let you run multiple tasks concurrently so that you can process data faster. Monitoring and Logging: These tools’ monitoring dashboards and logging capabilities let you track ETL tasks’ progress and identify and fix any issues. Retry Mechanisms: These tools can automatically retry failed tasks in case of disruptions or failures to ensure data integrity. Alerting: You can set up alerts or notifications in case of task failure or other instances to proactively manage your ETL processes. Dynamic Workflows: You can configure dynamic workflows in these tools that adapt to changes in schemas, data sources, or business requirements — increasing your ETL processes’ flexibility and adaptability. Code Reusability: Thanks to modularization and code reuse, you can efficiently build ETL pipelines and maintain them over time. Integration with Python Libraries: These tools integrate seamlessly with Python libraries and packages that are designed for data processing and analytics tasks, such as pandas, NumPy, and SciPy. Extensibility: Workflow management tools’ extensibility lets you integrate with different data sources, external systems, and databases through custom operators and plugins. Tools for Moving and Processing Data Python tools that handle data movement and processing can also help you design Python ETL workflows. Here’s how: Data Extraction: BeautifulSoup, requests, and similar libraries help with web scraping and API access for obtaining data from disparate sources. Data Transformation: pandas and NumPy offer remarkable data manipulation capabilities, and NLTK and spaCy can help with text processing. Data Loading: Python has database connectors (such as SQLAlchemy) that help you load transformed data into databases. Automation and Workflow: You can automate ETL processes using Python scripts or use a workflow management tool (like Apache Airflow) as discussed above Error Handling and Logging: Python has try-except blocks to handle errors, and the logging module ensures visibility into ETL task execution. Parallel Processing: Multiprocessing and threading enable parallel task execution, improving performance for large datasets. External System Integration: Python libraries offer easy integration with cloud services (such as boto3 for AWS), ensuring hassle-free interaction with external systems in a distributed environment. Self-Contained Python ETL Toolkits Python ETL toolkits are comprehensive libraries or frameworks offering end-to-end ETL capabilities within a single package. These toolkits’ integrated functionalities help you develop and deploy Python ETL pipelines easily — here’s how: Unified Environment: These toolkits provide a cohesive environment where you can perform all stages of ETL within the same framework without having to integrate multiple libraries or tools. Simplified Development: You get high-level abstractions and intuitive APIs for common ETL tasks within these toolkits, so you don’t have to write code for them. Pre-Built Components: Self-contained Python ETL toolkits are typically equipped with pre-built modules or components for handling frequently used data formats, databases, and transformations. This saves you time and effort and eliminates the need to code from scratch. Data Connectivity: These toolkits have built-in connectors and adapters for different data sources and destinations — such as databases, cloud storage, APIs, and file formats — to ensure seamless data movement across systems. Transformation Features: There’s a wide range of transformation methods, operators, or functions within these toolkits for data manipulation, enrichment, cleansing, and aggregation. This simplifies complex data transformations. Scalability and Performance: Self-contained Python ETL toolkits are often designed to scale with increasing data volume and have optimization features to enhance performance, such as parallel processing, caching mechanisms, and distributed computing. Monitoring and Management: These toolkits may have built-in monitoring, logging, and management functionalities to effectively track ETL jobs’ progress, resolve errors, and manage inter-task dependencies. Flexible Deployment: These toolkits offer flexibility in deployment, offering support for standalone applications, containerized environments like Docker, or integration with workflow management systems such as Apache Airflow. Why Use Python for Building ETL Pipelines? Here are some of the reasons behind using Python for ETL pipeline design: Open-Source Accessibility Python has been developed on an open-source, community-based model. The Python Software Foundation is dedicated to propagating Python open-source technology. As an open-source language, Python has few restrictions when it comes to platform and run environments. It works well with different platforms and runs on Windows and Linux with minimal modifications. While there are other open-source programming languages such as Java and R, Python offers greater ease of use and a far more extensive ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. Big Data Suitability Python requires less coding than other programming languages, making it simpler to write and maintain ETL scripts. It’s also equipped with well-tested libraries for increased functionality. These libraries cater to some of the most common big data tasks, simplifying computing and analytics with packages for numerical computing, statistical analysis, visualization, machine learning, and data analysis. Other languages such as Java and Scala have frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Flink to support big data processing. However, Python’s simplicity makes it more preferable for ETL pipeline development and iteration. Data Processing Speed Python is known for its high data processing speed. Its code features a simpler syntax and is easier to manage than other programming languages, resulting in faster execution of tasks. Optimizations and parallelization techniques further improve Python’s data processing performance. Lower-level languages such as C and C++ are often considered faster than Python for computational tasks. However, these languages typically require more complicated and verbose code, which ultimately slows development and affects its efficiency. Support for Unstructured Data Python also features built-in support for processing unstructured and unconventional data. Since most modern enterprise data is unstructured, Python is an organization’s key asset in this domain. Compared to other programming languages, this is where Python’s readability wins out and makes it particularly suitable for unstructured data processing. The language features resources that can effectively tackle unstructured data processing challenges. Here are a few examples: Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK): Has a suite of programs and libraries for natural language processing. spaCy: A Python library for enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP), with pre-trained models for various NLP tasks. scikit-learn: A Machine Learning (ML) library with multiple data analysis and preprocessing tools. All of The Python ETL Functionality, None of The Code With LIKE.TG, you can rapidly build, deploy, and automate ETL pipelines that are tailored to your business requirements — no coding, just a few clicks. Get started today. Start Your FREE Trial How to Build an ETL Pipeline in Python Below is an example of setting up an ETL pipeline using Python, specifically the Pandas library. The use case here involves extracting data from a CSV file, transforming it to add a new column indicating the length of text in a specific column, and then loading the transformed data into a new CSV file. Step 1: Extract Data Here, The function ‘extract_data’ uses the path to the input CSV file (‘input_file’) as its parameter. Inside the function, the ‘pd.read_csv()’ from the pandas library reads the data from the CSV file into a pandas DataFrame. The DataFrame containing the extracted data is returned. Step 2: Transform Data Here, The function ‘transform_data’ takes the extracted DataFrame (‘data’) as its parameter. Inside the function, the new column ‘text_length’ is added to the DataFrame using ‘data[‘text_column’].apply(lambda x: len(str(x)))’. This lambda function will calculate the length of the text in each row of the ‘text_column’. The transformed DataFrame is returned. Step 3: Load Data Here, The function ‘load_data’ takes the transformed DataFrame (‘data_transformed’) and the output CSV file’s path (‘output_file’) as its parameters. Inside the function, ‘data_transformed.to_csv()’ writes the transformed data to a new CSV file specified by ‘output_file’. Lastly, ‘index=False’ helps avoid writing row indices to the CSV file. Input and Output File Paths Here, two paths are specified. One to the input CSV file containing the data to be processed (‘input_file’) and the other to the output CSV file where the transformed data will be saved (‘output_file’). Executing The ETL Process Here, The Python ETL process is executed by calling the ‘extract_data’, ‘transform_data’, and ‘load_data’ functions sequentially with the appropriate arguments. The extracted data is stored in the ‘data’ DataFrame. The ‘transform_data’ function is called with the extracted (‘data’) as input, and the transformed data is stored in the ‘data_transformed’ DataFrame. Lastly, the transformed data is loaded into the output CSV file specified by ‘output_file’. Note that this code creates a very basic Python ETL pipeline. The more data an organization generates and consumes, the more complex the pipelines it will need to build and maintain. When it comes to building ETL pipelines in Python, increasing complexity can outweigh the benefits — which makes Python ETL tools a more feasible alternative. The Best Python ETL Tools in 2024 Some of the best Python ETL tools are discussed below: 1. Apache Airflow Apache Airflow is an open-source Python framework that uses Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to let users organize and manage their ETL pipelines. It supports the authoring, scheduling, and monitoring of workflows. Pros Cons DAGs combine multiple Python scripts into a dependency graph and enable parallel processing of tasks. Airflow lacks versioning of data pipelines. Users can’t redeploy a deleted Task or DAG. Airflow’s interactive user interface makes it easy to monitor ETL pipelines by visualizing and restarting workflow dependencies, successes, and failures as needed. Doesn’t preserve metadata for deleted jobs, making debugging and data management difficult. Operators can extend Airflow’s functionality to cover various use cases or enable its use as a data integration platform instead of a data tool. Users need some DevOps proficiency to get it running. 2. Luigi Luigi was originally developed by Spotify and is a Python framework that enables users to stitch multiple tasks together. Pros Cons Intuitive architecture, with jobs written in Python. There is no distribution of execution, so worker nodes are prone to overloading. Ideal for backend developers looking to automate straightforward ETL pipelines. Limited documentation and error-handling capabilities can complicate understanding and correcting task failures. Relatively easy to use with command-line interface integration. Not practical for real-time workflows due to its use of batch computing. 3. Pandas The Pandas library features the DataFrame object, a data structure that allows easy, user-friendly data manipulation. How Pandas simplifies data transformation is evident in the example of setting up ETL in Python, discussed earlier in this blog. Pros Cons Facilitates quick and easy data transformations. Offers limited extraction and loading functions. Great for small- to medium-sized datasets. Not ideal for large-scale data processing and in-memory operations. Convenient for writing simple scripts. Scalability is possible but not easy. 4. Petl Petl is ideal for meeting basic ETL requirements without advanced analytics. Pros Cons Petl uses minimal system memory and isn’t resource-intensive. Only offers basic transformation capabilities. Its extendable functionality uses simple code to add new data sources and destinations. Doesn’t handle large datasets well. Easy to use. Not suitable for use cases requiring high-speed operations or time-sensitive outcomes. 5. Bonobo Bonobo is a simple, lightweight Python ETL framework that allows users to build data pipelines via scripting. Pros Cons Bonobo doesn’t require learning new APIs, only an elementary understanding of Python. Good for simple and semi-complex data schemas but not for larger datasets. Allows rapid, parallel deployment of pipelines. Simplistic data handling that organizes data as a series of rows in nodes, making it challenging to perform analytics on the dataset as a whole. Open-source, scalable, and supports a wide range of data sources such as JSON, CSV, XLS, XML, and SQL. Still at the alpha stage with an uncertain development future. Version 0.6 was released over six years ago. 6. Pyspark As a Python API, PySpark allows users to access and use Apache Spark (the Scala programming language) directly through Python. Pros Cons PySpark is built to handle huge datasets, with features such as lazy loading, parallel processing, and Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). Despite impressive transformation capabilities, PySpark has somewhat limited extract and load functionality. Supports most Apache Spark features such as DataFrame, Spark SQL, Machine Learning, Spark Core, and Streaming. Complex pipelines can require users to write their own extractors. Allows users to write ETL tasks in either a Python-like or an SQL-like form. Errors in PySpark show references to the Python code and Java stack trace errors, making debugging difficult. 7. Bubbles What differentiates Bubbles from the other Python ETL tools discussed here is its metadata-based pipeline descriptions. This framework is written in Python but isn’t limited to it and features easy usability with other languages. Pros Cons Bubbles is technologically agnostic, ensuring users can focus on ETL processes without worrying about the technology behind them or data access. Requires Python 3.3, and there are no plans of backporting it to older Python versions. Allows users to set up ETL quickly. Sometimes, composition isn’t possible when adding custom operations if the objects are from different databases As an abstract and versatile framework, Bubbles is focused on the ETL processes instead of a specific programming language. Some conversion operations are meant to be used in Python only and can be resource-intensive when used on large datasets. When Should You Use a Python ETL Tool? Python ETL tools are ideal in one or more of the following scenarios: When an organization wants to code its own ETL tool and has developers or programmers who are proficient in Python. When organizational ETL requirements are straightforward and easily executable. When ETL requirements are highly specific and only Python can cater to them effectively. LIKE.TG as a Better Alternative to Python ETL Despite their considerable benefits, most Python ETL tools also share some drawbacks, such as: These tools require substantial knowledge and proficiency in Python for building and automating custom ETL pipelines. Many tools are more suitable for small- to medium-scale processes. Some tools’ scalability and speed can be limiting factors for rapidly growing organizations. Enterprises want an intuitive interface, high processing speeds, reliability, and scalability from their ETL solutions. Additionally, automating ETL testing using Python requires skilled ETL testers with proficiency in both ETL testing methodologies and the Python programming language. Therefore, many organizations look for an alternative to standard Python ETL tools that eliminates the need for hiring and retaining professionals and the associated costs. Enter LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG offers a tried-and-tested no-code environment, a unified interface, and hassle-free integration with different data sources and destinations. Its sophisticated data cleansing and transformation capabilities allow users to quickly turn raw data into refined insights. It’s the leading Python ETL alternative for enterprises wanting to build, deploy, and maintain ETL pipelines without writing a single line of code. Ready to automate your ETL processes? Book a demo or start a FREE trial today.

Working with large volumes of data requires effective data management practices and tools, and two of the frequently used processes are data ingestion and ETL . Given the similarities between these two processes, non-technical people seek to understand what makes them different, often using search queries like “data ingestion vs ETL”. Data ingestion focuses on the initial collection and import of data, preparing it for storage or future use. ETL, on the other hand, takes this process further by not only ingesting data but also transforming it. The transformation involves cleaning the data to remove inaccuracies or irrelevant information, structuring it into a predefined schema for easy querying, and adding valuable context before loading it into its destination, such as a data warehouse. Let’s have a closer look at data ingestion and ETL to understand how they are different and how they are often used together. This will help us understand their roles in a modern data pipeline architecture. What is Data Ingestion? Data ingestion is the process of collecting, importing, and transferring data from different sources such as files, databases, and streaming platforms into a storage or processing system It’s an initial step in the data processing pipeline, where raw data from sources such as files, streams, APIs, or databases is acquired and prepared for further analysis and storage. For instance, data ingestion for a retail company would involve collecting sales data from sources like mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, and customer feedback forms that would include product information, customer profiles, transaction records, and inventory updates. The data ingestion process would then involve extracting data from each source and loading it into a centralized data repository. There are two types of data ingestion techniques: Batch data ingestion: It involves collecting and moving data at regular intervals. Streaming data ingestion: This includes collecting data and loading it into the target repository in real time. is What is ETL? Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is a type of data integration process that was standardized in the 1970s. It involves extracting data from multiple sources, transforming it into a consistent format, and finally, loading it into the target system, which is typically a database, a data warehouse, or a data lake.Extraction involves retrieving data from different source systems such as APIs, files, databases, or streams. This step requires querying databases or reading files to gather the essential information. Transformation involves converting the extracted data into a format suitable for analysis and reporting. Some common transformation operations include normalization, data cleansing, aggregation, and enrichment. Finally, loading involves moving the transformed data into the target system for reporting or BI analysis. More recently, cloud computing has made it possible to flip the final two stages of ETL so that it works in the sequence Extract, Load, and Transform (ELT). However, the primary objective remains the same: integrate data from different sources, organize it into a standardized format or structure, and finally prepare it for analysis and decision-making. Data Ingestion vs. ETL: Differences Both these processes help improve the data knowledge of an organization as they change the data to the right format. Moreover, ETL and data ingestion both involve considerations for data quality. ETL emphasizes deduplication, data cleansing, and validation to ensure consistency and accuracy. Similarly, data ingestion focuses on acquiring raw data reliably. Despite all the similarities, data ingestion and ETL have some clear differences. For starters, the goal with ETL is to extract, transform, and load data into the target repository in a consistent format to maintain data quality and integrity. On the other hand, data ingestion aims to gather and import raw data from different sources into a centralized repository for further analysis and processing. Here are some more differences between data ingestion and ETL: Data ingestion precedes ETL in the data processing pipeline and serves as the initial step in aggregating raw data. ETL comes later and aims to prepare data for analysis and reporting. ETL involves data transformation, cleansing, and integration activities, while data ingestion involves data movement. The aim of data ingestion is to collect raw data, which might still have many quality issues. However, ETL always cleans the information and changes it into the right format before loading it into the target system. Data ingestion processes almost always trigger processes in other systems, while ETL pipelines end right after loading data into the target system. Data ingestion supports both batch and real-time processing, while ETL usually moves data in batches on a regular schedule. Key Considerations for Choosing Between Data Ingestion and ETL Real-time data requirements: Data ingestion is ideal in this case as it facilitates real-time or near-real time processing better. It allows us to ingest and analyze data streams as they arrive. This proves beneficial in decision making. Batch processing cases: ETL is more suited to batch processing cases where data is collected and processed in batches. This easily helps manage large volumes of data efficiently as it applies transformations and loading data into the target systems at scheduled intervals. Structured data requirements: ETL can easily extract both structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. Hence, it can be used when there’s a need to extract, transform, and load data from structured sources like relational databases. Predictable data processing: The characteristics like scalability and cost-effectiveness make ETL an ideal choice for predictable data processing tasks. Organizations can schedule ETL jobs during off-peak hours when the system loads are low. This reduces operational costs and optimizes resource utilization. Compatible source and target system: When source and target systems are compatible and require little to no transformation, data ingestion is the way to go. Data ingestion allows companies to ingest the data directly into the target system without manipulation of any kind. Data ingestion or ETL? Both! With the ongoing debate on data ingestion vs ETL, it is essential to understand that it’s not about choosing one over the other. Instead, both play a key role in the data lifecycle and complement each other for seamless data flow and processing. Here’s why choosing both data ingestion and ETL is a wise approach: Data ingestion ensures that every piece of data, no matter its source, is captured. This inclusiveness is needed because organizations rely on a wide variety of data types and sources to inform their decisions. While data ingestion gathers the data, ETL transforms this raw data into a format that’s ready for analysis. Without ETL, the data might remain in a state that’s difficult or impossible to analyze effectively. It ensures data accuracy and reliability by standardizing formats and cleaning up any inconsistencies. To sum up, data ingestion helps kickstart the data integration and management process by capturing raw information. ETL further transforms this data into valuable information. Together, they enable organizations to carry out strategic planning and make informed decisions. Benefits of Data Ingestion and ETL Data ingestion and ETL provide several benefits for businesses, enabling them to effectively handle and utilize their data. Some of the key benefits include; Real-time Analytics: Data ingestion and ETL (streaming) support real-time processing. This means businesses can process and analyze data as it arrives, thus facilitating timely responses to events. Ingesting and processing data continuously helps organizations to respond promptly to changing business conditions. Scalability and flexibility: Data ingestion and ETL make it easier for organizations to scale data processing and storage by enabling them to handle massive amounts of data from diverse sources efficiently. Using parallel processing and optimization techniques, companies can accelerate data processing and ingestion workflows. Maintains data integrity and data quality assurance: Apart from collecting data, ETL and data ingestion processes also include mechanisms that ensure data quality and integrity. This can include data cleansing, validation, deduplication, and error handling. Considering these, it’s easier to prevent issues and improve the overall reliability of the data analytics and reporting. Cost Efficiency: Operational costs associated with data management can be reduced using specialized ETL tools and data ingestion tools. These tools automate the data ingestion and ETL processes, which eliminates the need for manual intervention. Consequently, companies can achieve cost efficiency while maintaining high data quality standards. Support for Advanced Analytics: ETL and data ingestion allow the integration of advanced technologies like predictive modeling, machine learning, and data mining as they prepare and organize the data, providing the necessary groundwork. Organizations can retrieve information about valuable patterns and correlations and drive actionable insights. Data Ingestion Use Cases: Data ingestion is important in acquiring and moving data into a system for initial processing or storage. Here are some use cases where data ingestion is specifically applicable. IoT Data Management: Data ingestion is the foundational step in managing data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It collects, processes, and stores the large amount of data generated by these devices. Data ingestion allows the organizations to capture data from different sources in real-time or near real-time. Moreover, data digestion makes it possible to integrate the IoT data into existing data processing pipelines, cloud-based platforms, and data lakes. Customer Data Onboarding: Data ingestion integrates external customer data sources into the data infrastructure of an organization. The customer information is incorporated from different channels, including third-party vendors, marketing databases, etc. This efficient data collection allows organizations to ingest large amounts of customer data in real-time or batch processes. Ingesting data in a centralized repository helps an organization in targeted advertising campaigns and marketing initiatives. Log File Analysis: Log-based ingestion is common in performance analysis and security monitoring. Data is ingested from log files generated by systems, applications, or devices that include valuable information about user interactions and system performance. Ingesting log data enables organizations to proactive detection and response to threats. Financial Market Data Processing: Information like currency exchange rates, market indices, stock prices, and trading volumes prove essential in market analysis and risk management. Therefore, its essential to get such information from different sources into a centralized data repository. Ingesting financial market data helps an organization perform various analytical and quantitative tasks including algorithmic trading, modeling, and risk assessment. ETL Use Cases ETL processes are used in various industries for integrating data from multiple sources. Here are some common use cases of ETL: Automating Manual Workflows ETL, when implemented through ETL tools can be used to automate manual workflows. By using ETL tools organizations can design automation logic, monitor operations for continuous optimization and schedule data processing. This helps organizations to enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and reduce manual intervention in data-related tasks. Data Warehousing ETL is preferred for data warehousing as it has comprehensive data processing capabilities. It ensures quality and usability within the warehouse through quality assurance, integration of multiple sources, and management of historical data. Providing these functionalities, ETL makes sure the data in the warehouse is reliable and optimized Streamlining Data Migration Data migration can be streamlined using ETL, particularly when transferring from an on-premises system to the cloud. It begins by pulling both structured and unstructured data from a source system, then cleans and filters it, and finally loads the cleaned data into the target database. ETL helps companies move large amounts of data while ensuring proper organization and ease of use in the target system. Conclusion While different processes, organizations use data ingestion and ETL together to take full advantage of their data assets. Data ingestion facilitates the collection and storage of raw data from diverse sources, while ETL processes are needed to transform and load this data into structured repositories for analysis, reporting, and decision-making. Whether you need to ingest data from multiple sources or ETL it into your data warehouse for analysis and decision-making, you need a modern, no-code data integration solution to simplify and automate the process. This is where LIKE.TG comes into the picture with its Data Pipeline Builder. LIKE.TG Data Pipeline Builder enables you to build fully automated data pipelines to ingest data and execute ETL workflows without writing a single line of code. Streamline company-wide data integration with many native connectors, embedded data quality and governance features, built-in transformations, parallel processing ETL engine, and an intuitive UI. Execute Workflows Without a Single Line of Data Transform how you handle data. 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What is a Data Catalog? A data catalog is a central inventory of organizational data. It provides a comprehensive view of all data assets in an organization, including databases, datasets, files, and data pipelines. They enable organizations to efficiently manage data by facilitating discovery, lineage tracking, and governance enforcement. Establishing a data catalog is part of a broader data governance framework and includes: creating a business glossary, increasing data literacy across the company and data classification. They are usually created after a company has defined its data, labeled it, identified the relevant stakeholders responsible for data security, and assigned them access roles. Data Catalog vs. Data Dictionary A common confusion arises when data dictionaries come into the discussion. Both data catalog and data dictionary serve essential roles in data management. The former emphasizes discovery and exploration, while the latter focuses on defining and describing data elements in detail. While a data catalog serves as a centralized inventory of metadata, a data dictionary focuses on defining data elements and attributes, describing their meaning, format, and usage. The former offers a comprehensive view of an organization’s data assets. It enables data discovery and exploration by enabling users to easily search and explore available data assets. Additionally, data catalogs include features such as data lineage tracking and governance capabilities that help with data quality management and compliance. On the other hand, a data dictionary typically provides technical metadata and is commonly used as a reference for data modeling and database design. Benefits of a Data Catalog How does a data catalog benefit an organization? Are the benefits just limited to data analysts? Not really! Once implemented correctly, the benefits of a data catalog extend throughout the organization, including: Improved Data Accessibility: With a catalog of data, users can easily find and access relevant data assets for analysis and decision-making. The greater accessibility not only streamlines access to data but also and also enhances productivity. Enhanced Data Trust: Trusted data is important for effective decision-making. Acting as a repository for metadata, data catalogs facilitate metadata management and data lineage tracking. This increased transparency allows users to easily understand the meaning, origin, and quality of the data they’re working with. So, the transparency helps identify potential errors and inconsistencies, leading to more trustworthy and reliable data. Data Governance Enforcement: They also act as a platform for enforcing data governance policies, monitoring data usage, and ensuring regulatory compliance, all while promoting data discoverability and fostering a data-driven culture. Increased Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: They improve collaboration and communication among data stakeholders by providing a platform for sharing knowledge and documenting data assets. Reduced Data Redundancy and Duplication: After collecting data, catalogs help organizations identify and eliminate redundant or duplicate data assets and reduce storage costs. What Does a Data Catalog Include? Naturally, the next questions usually are how a data catalog works and what it’s made of? First, let’s look at what information it contains. A data catalog consists of various types of metadata, including: Key Components Operational metadata: This is also known as process metadata. It includes information about the execution of processes and workflows within the system. Operational metadata often includes timestamps, execution logs, transaction IDs, resource usage metrics, and system configuration settings. It provides a lineage of data to allow analysts to track a data asset’s recency and relevancy. Technical metadata: Also called structural metadata, this data type outlines how data is organized in a system. It includes details like the format, structure, and characteristics of data elements, like data types, field lengths, formats, keys, indexes, relationships, and storage locations. This metadata is essential for understanding whether data manipulation is necessary before analysis. Business metadata: Business metadata provides business context and meaning to data assets, such as their suitability for a task and overall value. It typically includes data definitions, business rules, data ownership, usage policies, and business glossary terms. How Does a Data Catalog Work? A data catalog works by collecting, organizing, and providing access to metadata about an organization’s data assets. Here’s how it typically operates: Data Ingestion: Metadata from various sources, such as databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and files, is ingested into it. Metadata Organization: The extracted metadata is organized and stored within the catalog. This functionality includes data definitions, schema details, data lineage, and usage statistics. Data Discovery: Users can search and explore the repository to discover relevant data assets based on their metadata attributes, keywords, or tags. This feature allows users to find the data they need quickly and efficiently. Collaboration: Many catalogs offer features to support and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. These features could be anything from annotations and comments to ratings and reviews. Data Lineage Tracking: It tracks the lineage of data, showing how it moves and transforms across different systems and processes. This capability provides insights into data provenance and helps users understand the origin and impact of the data. Data Governance: It provides mechanisms for defining and implementing governance rules that administrators can use to enforce data governance policies and controls, ensuring that data is managed and used in compliance with organizational policies and regulatory requirements. How to Build a Data Catalog? Creating a catalog involves multiple important steps. Requirement Gathering: The first step is all about identifying the organization’s data management needs and objectives. Involving stakeholders from the outset simplifies the process of defining the requirements and understanding why the organization needs a centralized repository for data assets. Data Discovery: The next step is identifying and inventorying all data sources within the organization, including databases, data lakes, files, and applications, to understand the scope of the data catalog. Metadata Collection: Next, users harvest metadata from the identified data sources, including definitions, schema information, and data lineage. Metadata can also be collected via manual curation in cases where data is sensitive or complex. Metadata Standardization: Standardization and normalization of the collected metadata come next. It involves defining metadata standards, mappings, and taxonomies to harmonize metadata attributes. This step ensures consistency and compatibility across different data sources. Metadata Enrichment: This part involves enhancing metadata with additional contextual information, such as business glossary terms, data classifications, and data usage policies. Metadata Storage: Establishing a centralized repository where users can store, organize, and access the collected metadata. Data Catalog Population: Next, users populate the data catalog with standardized and enriched metadata. User Access and Governance: Administrators then implement data governance policies and define access controls and permissions to manage access rights and modify the data catalog. User Training and Adoption: Team leads also provide training and support to users to help them understand how to navigate and utilize the data catalog effectively for their data management and analytics tasks. Encourage user adoption through communication and outreach efforts. Continuous Maintenance and Updates: Data stewards regularly update and maintain the catalog. Ongoing metadata management, data profiling, and data quality assessment activities ensure the accuracy and relevance of the cataloged information. Having an effective data governance strategy helps greatly in implementing these steps. Since a data catalog is part of a larger governance strategy, stakeholder buy-in, effective data collection, and literacy are needed to make these instruments work. Challenges in Implementing a Data Catalog and How to Avoid Them Common challenges in adopting a data catalog include: Data Silos: Data may be scattered across various systems and departments, leading to data silos that hinder the effectiveness of the data catalog. Data Quality Issues: Inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent metadata can undermine the usability and trustworthiness of the data catalog. User Adoption: Lack of awareness, training, or perceived value may result in low user adoption rates, limiting the impact of the data catalog on organizational data management practices. Best Practices To overcome these challenges, data leaders within companies can: Promote Effective Data Collection: Implement processes and technologies to effectively integrate data from disparate sources, breaking down data silos and providing a unified view of the organization’s data assets. Establish High Data Quality Standards: Define and enforce quality standards to ensure that metadata in the data catalog is accurate, complete, and consistent. Implement data profiling and cleansing techniques to proactively identify and address data quality issues. Provide User Training and Create a Data Culture: Offer comprehensive training programs, documentation, and create a data-driven culture to educate users about the benefits and capabilities of data governance measures. Highlight real use cases and success stories to demonstrate the value of the data catalog in improving data management and decision-making processes. Additionally, involve users in the design and development process to ensure that it meets their needs and preferences. Data Catalog Use Cases Let’s look at some use cases across multiple industries: Understanding an asset’s history and improved compliance Compliance officers can rely on the organization’s data repository to ensure data integrity. Utilizing the data lineage feature, they gain invaluable insights into the origin, movement, and transformations of data across disparate systems and processes. Officers can verify the accuracy and reliability of reports and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. They can also identify potential vulnerabilities, assess the impact of data breaches or system failures, and implement risk mitigation strategies effectively. Empowering self-service analytics In certain fast-paced sectors like healthcare, medical researchers, clinicians, and administrators require timely access to data for diagnosis and recommendations. Through a data catalog, they can quickly discover and access curated healthcare datasets, patient records, and clinical trial data. With intuitive search capabilities and detailed metadata provided by the data catalog, researchers can quickly find relevant data assets based on their research needs and objectives. Improved collaboration Usually, various teams, including marketing, sales, and finance, must collaborate on a campaign. Using data stored in a central location, members from different departments can access and share relevant customer data, transaction records, and demographic information in a single place. As the project progresses, data scientists step in to analyze the shared datasets. They apply advanced analytics techniques to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior. They then work with the marketing and sales teams to develop targeted marketing campaigns and personalized promotions based on the insights derived from the data analysis. Data monetization A telecommunications company can use its catalog to identify customer usage data, including call records, data usage patterns, and location information. Once identified, the team can categorize the customer data into valuable datasets for monetization. By packaging and selling anonymized and aggregated customer data, the company provides valuable insights into consumer behavior, demographics, and mobility patterns. Data Catalog Tools Data catalog tools are essential in supporting and implementing a data governance strategy. Modern tools have extensive features while being very easy to setup and use. However, not all tools are equal, and deciding on one can be difficult. So, a comprehensive software should offer the following key features: Metadata Collection and Management: This includes capabilities for harvesting metadata from various cloud and on-premises data sources, including databases, data lakes, files, and applications. Data Discovery: Intuitive search and browse functionalities to discover and explore data assets based on metadata attributes, keywords, business glossary, or tags. Data Lineage Tracking: It should be able to track the lineage of data, showing how data moves and transforms across different systems and processes. Data Governance Enforcement: The solution should have enforcement for data governance policies and controls, like data classification, access controls, and compliance regulations. AI- powered Automation: A robust tool can automate tasks ranging from data ingestion and metadata storage to business glossary creation using the power of AI. Analysts can also use AI to provide in-tool recommendations and auto-naming capabilities. Collaboration and Sharing: It should allow users to collaborate and share insights via a business glossary, documentation, ratings, and annotations about data assets. Robust Integration Capabilities: Integrating with other data management and analytics tools, such as data integration, visualization, and machine learning platforms. It should also support REST APIs for external connectivity. Security and Compliance: Built-in security features and compliance controls, including encryption, data masking, and audit logging. LIKE.TG – Data Catalog Tool with end-to-end Capabilities If ‘you’re looking to invest in data governance, off-the-shelf tools like LIKE.TG help streamline the entire process. LIKE.TG Data Governance provides a central platform for managing your company data assets without writing any code. Powered by AI, it has multiple features for streamlining the entire governance process. The AI-boosted features include: Data discoverability, Data enrichment, Data Profiling, and a Business glossary. LIKE.TG Data Governance is part of LIKE.TG Data Stack, our end-to-end data management platform. It empowers business users to manage the entire data management project in a single tool, from ETL/ELT to data warehousing and analytics—all code-free. Combined with award-winning customer care, LIKE.TG is the preferred choice for companies investing in data governance. Want to see how LIKE.TG can help you create a robust data governance strategy? Schedule a personalized demo. Learn more about our data management and governance platform.

This article covers everything about enterprise data management, including its definition, components, comparison with master data management, benefits, and best practices. What Is Enterprise Data Management (EDM)? Enterprise data management (EDM) is a holistic approach to inventorying, handling, and governing your organization’s data across its entire lifecycle to drive decision-making and achieve business goals. It provides a strategic framework to manage enterprise data with the highest standards of data quality, security, and accessibility. This means that it includes all the tools, processes, and even people that make it easy for your organization to work with data. It’s not a single person’s duty to manage enterprise data—in fact, its sheer volume requires a dedicated team of cross-functional personnel. Consequently, managing enterprise data is generally the responsibility of database administrators (DBAs), data scientists, IT administrators, and data stewards. This is not an exhaustive list, and the specific roles and responsibilities can vary depending on the size and structure of your organization. Why is Enterprise Data Management Important? The increasing digitization of business operations has led to the generation of massive amounts of data from various sources, such as customer interactions, transactions, social media, sensors, and more. This data, often referred to as big data, holds valuable insights that you can leverage to gain a competitive edge. For example, with a data warehouse and solid foundation for business intelligence (BI) and analytics, you can respond quickly to changing market conditions, emerging trends, and evolving customer preferences. Data breaches and regulatory compliance are also growing concerns. Navigating this complex landscape without establishing robust security measures and a data governance framework exposes your organization to financial and legal repercussions. As such, organizations need a formalized approach to data management, especially at the enterprise level. They need a dependable enterprise data management system—a combination of frameworks, programs, platforms, software, and tools—to use data to their advantage. Craft an Effective Enterprise Data Management Strategy A robust enterprise data management strategy is a prerequisite to ensuring the seamless and secure handling of information across the organization. Download this whitepaper and create an end-to-end data management strategy for your business. Download Whitepaper Master Data Management vs. Enterprise Data Management Together, enterprise data management and master data management (MDM) offer effective ways to overcome data challenges, enabling you to harness your data’s full potential. Both aim to enhance data governance, improve data quality, and ensure that data is accurate and consistent across the organization. However, it’s also important to note that they serve different purposes and have distinct functionalities. First, enterprise data management takes on a holistic approach—it serves as the overarching strategy, eliminating the chaos of siloed information and conflicting versions of the truth. It focuses on establishing policies and processes throughout the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition and storage to analysis and utilization. On the other hand, master data management complements it by focusing on the master data. And second, enterprise data management accounts for all data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. In contrast, master data management includes core entities like customers, products, employees, and other key elements that are shared and used across the organization. The table below summarizes master data management vs. enterprise data management: Master Data Management (MDM) Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Scope Creating and managing a single version of specific critical business data (master data). Management of all enterprise data, including master data. Focus Area Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of a limited set of critical data. Takes a holistic approach to data quality, security, and governance. Data Types Primarily deals with core entities like customers, products, employees, etc. Addresses various types of data, including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Applicability Well-suited for organizations with a need for precise management of specific data entities. Suitable for organizations seeking a comprehensive strategy for managing diverse data types across all business areas. Components of Enterprise Data Management Generally speaking, the components of enterprise data management build upon the core principles of data management, which means there’s a bit of an overlap between the two. These components provide specific functionalities that contribute to a comprehensive strategy for enterprise data management. The main components of enterprise data management include: Data Governance Data governance sets the ground rules for data ownership, access, and usage across your organization. Building a data catalog and making clear data management policies enables you to handle data responsibly and ensure compliance with regulations. Data Integration It’s commonplace for data to be scattered across departments and business units. Data integration bridges these gaps as it eliminates silos, combining information from various sources into a unified, holistic view of your organization. Data Quality Management Not all data is created equal. Inaccurate or inconsistent information leads to flawed decisions. Data quality management enables you to implement processes for data cleansing, validation, and ongoing monitoring, providing your teams with reliable data that’s fit for analysis. Master Data Management To maintain the integrity and coherence of critical business information, such as clients, products, and workforce details, you need master data management. Your teams are in a better position to make more informed decisions with accurate master data. MDM also helps organizations achieve a single source of truth (SSOT) that streamlines company-wide collaboration. Metadata Management Data is valuable, but understanding what that data means is invaluable for organizations. Functioning as a data dictionary, metadata management defines the structure and meaning of your data assets. It also facilitates effective data discovery and knowledge sharing within the organization. Data Security and Privacy Enterprise data management goes beyond organizing and storing data; it also ensures data security and privacy. The ever-evolving regulatory environment means that your organization must always be capable of navigating a changing set of rules and standards that govern data. Enterprise Data Management Strategy An enterprise data management strategy is a comprehensive plan outlining how your organization will handle data throughout its lifecycle. It’s a roadmap that covers the acquisition, storage, integration, processing, protection, access, and utilization of data to ensure it becomes a valuable asset for your business. Enterprise data management goes beyond the technical aspects of handling data—your EDM strategy must also take into account the human factors involved in managing enterprise data. In other words, it should foster a data-driven culture that prioritizes communication, collaboration, and ongoing training with the goal of empowering your teams so they can leverage data for organizational success. Formulating an Enterprise Data Management Strategy Because enterprise data management demands a tailored approach, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. Here’s a high-level blueprint that serves as a guide to creating an enterprise data management strategy: Business Goals and Data Needs: Start by aligning your EDM strategy with your organization’s overall business goals. Identify the specific data needs that will support achieving these goals. What questions do you need your data to answer? Data Inventory and Governance: Get a clear picture of your current data landscape. This includes identifying and mapping all your data sources, understanding their formats, assessing their quality, defining ownership, and establishing security and access controls. Change Management and Training: Shift your company towards a data-driven culture and equip your employees with data literacy skills by providing ongoing training programs. Technology and Tools: Equip your team with the right software and infrastructure for managing enterprise data at scale. This includes data management platforms, data integration tools, and other solutions. Metrics and Performance Monitoring: Define key performance indicators to track the effectiveness of your enterprise data management strategy and identify areas for improvement. Craft an Effective Enterprise Data Management Strategy A robust enterprise data management strategy is a prerequisite to ensuring the seamless and secure handling of information across the organization. Download this whitepaper and create an end-to-end data management strategy for your business. Download Whitepaper The Benefits of Enterprise Data Management A successful enterprise data management strategy offers several benefits. These include: Improved Decision-Making Imagine marketing campaigns targeted at the wrong customer segments due to inaccurate data. However, with a centralized, clean pool of data, your teams are in the ideal position to generate insights that inform decision-making. Business decisions directly affect the bottom line—with an effective enterprise data management system, the decision-makers in your organization have the power to not only boost innovation but also mitigate risks associated with data breaches and non-compliance. Enhanced Operational Efficiency Data silos across the enterprise mean isolated departments working with incomplete or potentially inconsistent information. Breaking down these silos and achieving a SSOT requires a centralized repository that acts as a single point of entry and access for all departments. Strategically storing and managing enterprise data eliminates these silos and inconsistencies, enabling seamless data sharing and collaboration across departments. This translates to streamlined workflows, reduced errors, faster completion times, and reduced costs. Strengthened Compliance With complete control over your data, it’s much easier to make way for data governance practices, access controls, and data retention policies. And when implemented properly, these practices help your organization comply with various data privacy regulations, like GDPR or CCPA, and minimize legal risks. Additionally, a well-managed data infrastructure facilitates efficient internal and external audits as it simplifies the complexities in data collection and verification during compliance checks. Being transparent about data security and privacy not only demonstrates compliance with regulatory requirements but also strengthens your enterprise’s reputation. Enterprise Data Management Challenges When implemented right, an enterprise data management strategy has the potential to empower your organization to leverage trusted data for its data-driven initiatives. However, implementing it comes with its own set of challenges, chief among which are the following: Eliminating data silos across the enterprise Enterprise data often gets compartmentalized within departments and systems, creating isolated silos. These silos make it difficult to get a unified view of your organization’s data, hindering accurate data analysis and decision-making. Integrating company-wide data Imagine managing enterprise data from dozens of departments, each with its own systems and formats. Customer information might be scattered across marketing databases, sales CRM, and loyalty programs. Financial data could reside in separate accounting and ERP systems. The challenge lies not only in combining data from multiple sources but doing so in a way without compromising its integrity. Improving data quality Enterprise data can be a messy affair, especially when it comes to ensuring data quality. Incomplete records, inconsistencies, and outdated information mean businesses risk security vulnerabilities, wasted resources, and ultimately, customer dissatisfaction. The complexity of data ecosystems in many enterprises further amplifies the challenge. Complying with regulations One of the biggest challenges, especially in heavily regulated industries, is steering through the regulatory landscape. Implementing and maintaining processes and systems that align with these diverse and changing requirements can be resource-intensive. Additionally, different regulations sometimes have conflicting or overlapping demands, posing a challenge in creating a comprehensive compliance strategy. Modernizing legacy systems EDM requires that there’s a clear understanding of data origin and transformations. However, legacy systems store data in outdated formats or proprietary databases and lack proper documentation on how data flows through the system, where it originates, and how it’s transformed. The lack of data lineage makes it challenging to understand the meaning of data and establish its trustworthiness, and migrating this data to a modern system requires careful planning and execution to retain its accuracy. Finding and retaining skilled data professionals Managing enterprise data requires qualified professionals who understand data architecture, best practices, and the specific tools used by the organization. Similarly, developing and executing a successful data strategy also needs experienced personnel. However, the demand for skilled data professionals far exceeds the available talent pool, making it challenging for organizations to attract and retain top talent. LIKE.TG's No-Code Data Management Platform Whether it's extracting and integrating unstructured data, API management, building a custom data warehouse, or EDI management, LIKE.TG's 100% no-code platform allows you to manage and govern your data with ease. Learn More What is an Enterprise Data Management Platform? Enterprise data management platforms are software systems that help businesses in managing the lifecycle of their data. Different platforms offer different levels of convenience and features; some are fully automated, while others still require you to write scripts to integrate and manage data. For example, LIKE.TG is an automated data management platform that enables you to manage enterprise data from end-to-end—without writing a single line of code. How Do Enterprise Data Management Solutions Help Businesses? Enterprise data management software helps businesses simplify and automate several tasks. For example: Automatically extracting unstructured data from various sources using AI. Building ETL pipelines in an intuitive, drag-and-drop UI. Moving data seamlessly from on-premises systems to the cloud environment. Improving data quality management and governing enterprise data. Integrating with legacy systems to retrieve data and modernizing the enterprise data architecture. Enterprise Data Management Best Practices The success of an enterprise data management program doesn’t rely solely on managing data but also on the people who are tasked to oversee it. So, it’s important to incorporate some best practices into your EDM program. Secure a senior leader as an enterprise data management champion to drive adoption across the organization. Define clear goals, understand what your organization wants to achieve with its data, and communicate it to all stakeholders. Educate and provide the requisite training to everyone, regardless of technical background, to understand, interpret, and leverage data effectively. Implement a data catalog to understand what data you have, where it resides, and how it’s used. Prioritize data security, privacy, and governance. Implement procedures that enable access to accurate and timely data. Manage Enterprise Data from End-to-End with LIKE.TG Enterprise data management includes several complex tasks, such as extracting unstructured data from disparate sources, building data pipelines for data integration and movement, managing data warehouses and other destination systems, designing and managing APIs, and the list goes on. However, what simplifies and automates these tasks is enterprise data management software—and one such solution that does it the best is LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is an end-to-end data management platform that allows you to manage enterprise data in a single, unified UI. With LIKE.TG, you can: Extract and manage unstructured data with ease Integrate data between your systems, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud, via ETL, ELT, CDC, APIs Improve data quality and prepare it for analytics, reporting, and BI Design, build, and deploy a custom enterprise data warehouse in a matter of days Build, publish, and monitor APIs from a centralized wizard Catalog, enrich, structure, and store your data while enabling secure access to it and sharing it within your organization Simplify building, parsing, and processing EDI documents with your trading partners And much more—all without writing a single line of code. Simplify enterprise data management with LIKE.TG. Download a 14-day free trial or signup for a free demo to get started.

Data completeness plays a pivotal role in the accuracy and reliability of insights derived from data, that ultimately guide strategic decision-making. This term encompasses having all the data, ensuring access to the right data in its entirety, to avoid biased or misinformed choices. Even a single missing or inaccurate data point can skew results, leading to misguided conclusions, potentially leading to losses or missed opportunities. This blog takes a deep dive into the concept of data completeness, exploring its importance, common challenges, and effective strategies to ensure that datasets are comprehensive and reliable. What is Data Completeness? Data completeness refers to the extent to which all necessary information is present in a dataset. It indicates whether there are any missing values or gaps in the data. When all relevant data points are included, a dataset is considered complete. In contrast, incomplete data contains missing or empty fields, which can hinder analysis and decision-making. Examples of Incomplete Data Survey Data with Missing Responses Customer Database with Inconsistent Entries Financial Records with Incomplete Transactions The Importance of Complete Data When it comes to drawing conclusions and making informed decisions, data completeness matters more than businesses often realize. Data Completeness leads to: Improved Accuracy: Complete data ensures that analyses, models, and decisions are based on the most accurate representation of the situation. Incomplete data may lead to skewed results or erroneous conclusions. Increased Reliability: With complete data, findings and predictions gain higher reliability, minimizing the likelihood of errors stemming from data gaps and enhancing the trustworthiness of results. Optimized Decision-making: Complete data empowers decision-makers with the necessary information to make informed and timely decisions. It reduces uncertainty and enables stakeholders to assess risks and opportunities more accurately. Long-term Planning: Complete datasets support long-term planning efforts by providing reliable historical data, enabling organizations to identify trends and make informed projections for the future. Higher Customer Satisfaction: Complete data supports better understanding of customer needs and preferences, enabling organizations to tailor products, services, and experiences effectively. The Role of Data Completeness in Data Quality Completeness is one of the six primary dimensions of data quality assessment. Data quality is a broader term that encompasses various aspects of data, including completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness, and relevance, among others. It represents the overall condition of data and its fitness for use in a specific context or application. Data completeness, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which all required data elements or attributes are present and available in a dataset. Data completeness is a measure that directly affects the accuracy and reliability of data. When important attributes or fields are missing, it can lead to erroneous analyses and incorrect conclusions. Incomplete data may also skew statistical measures, such as averages or correlations, potentially leading to flawed insights. Rather than engaging in the data quality vs. data completeness debate, it is crucial to recognize that prioritizing data completeness is fundamental for ensuring high data quality. Data Completeness vs Data Accuracy vs Data Consistency Understanding the differences between data completeness, data accuracy, and data consistency is crucial for ensuring the quality and reliability of data in any organization. Here’s a comparison table highlighting the differences between data completeness, data accuracy, and data consistency: Aspect Data Completeness Data Accuracy Data Consistency Definition Presence of all required data elements or attributes in a dataset. Correctness, precision, and reliability of data values. Uniformity and conformity of data across different databases, systems, or applications. Focus Ensures all expected data points are present without any missing values. Ensures data values reflect real-world entities accurately and reliably. Ensures data remains synchronized and coherent across various sources or systems. Concerns Missing data points, gaps in datasets. Errors, discrepancies, inconsistencies in data values. Conflicts, contradictions, discrepancies between datasets or systems. Importance Essential for comprehensive analysis and decision-making. Critical for making informed decisions and accurate reporting. Vital for reliable analysis, preventing errors, and ensuring trust in data. Example Ensuring all sales transactions are recorded in a sales database. Verifying that customer contact information is correctly entered in a CRM system. Ensuring product prices are consistent across different sales channels. Mitigation Implementing data validation checks, data collection protocols. Data cleansing, verification against reliable sources. Implementing data integration strategies, synchronization mechanisms. How To Determine and Measure Data Completeness There are several approaches to assess data completeness, including attribute-level and record-level approaches, as well as techniques like data sampling and data profiling. Here’s an overview of each approach: Attribute-level Approach In the attribute-level approach, each individual data attribute or field within a dataset is examined to determine its completeness. To measure completeness at this level, users can calculate the percentage of non-null or non-missing values for each attribute. For categorical attributes, users may also look for the presence of all expected categories or values. Example: A dataset contains customer information, including attributes like name, age, email, and phone number. To measure completeness at the attribute level, one would examine each attribute to see how many records have missing values. For instance, if 90% of the records have a value for the “age” attribute, but only 70% have an email address, the email attribute would be considered less complete. Record-level Approach In the record-level approach, entire records or rows of data are evaluated for completeness. This involves assessing whether each record contains all the necessary attributes or fields, and if those fields are populated with meaningful data. Completeness can be measured by calculating the percentage of fully populated records in the dataset. Example: Continuing with the customer information dataset example, with the record-level approach, each record is assessed as a whole. If a record is missing any essential attribute (e.g., name or email), it would be considered incomplete. For instance, if 70% of records have non-null name and email, the dataset will be 70% complete. Data Sampling Data sampling involves selecting a subset of data from the larger dataset for analysis. Sampling can be random or stratified, depending on the characteristics of the dataset and the objectives of the analysis. By analyzing a sample of the data, you can infer the completeness of the entire dataset, assuming the sample is representative. Example: Let’s say there’s a massive dataset with millions of records. Instead of analyzing the entire dataset, one might randomly sample 1,000 records and assess completeness within this sample. If the sample is representative of the overall dataset, findings can be extrapolated to estimate completeness across the entire dataset. Data Profiling Data profiling is a systematic analysis of the structure, content, and quality of a dataset. It involves examining various statistical properties of the data, such as distributions, frequencies, and summary statistics. Profiling can help identify frequency of missing values, outliers, duplicates, and other data quality issues that may affect completeness. Tools like histograms, summary statistics, frequency tables, and outlier detection algorithms can be used for data profiling. Example: Using data profiling tools or techniques, one can generate summary statistics and visualizations to identify frequency of missing values across different attributes. For instance, a histogram could be generated showing the distribution of missing values for each attribute or calculating the percentage of missing values for each attribute. 5 Common Challenges in Ensuring Data Completeness Data Entry Errors: Human errors during data entry, such as typos, missing values, or incorrect formatting. Incomplete datasets may contain missing values due to various reasons, including equipment malfunctions, respondent non-response, or data collection errors. Data Integration Issues: Combining data from multiple sources can cause incompatibilities in data structures or identifiers, which can lead to incomplete or inconsistent datasets. Data Quality Control: Inadequate quality control processes can lead to incomplete data, as errors may go undetected during data collection or processing. Lack of Data Governance: Absence of clear data governance policies and procedures can result in inconsistent data definitions, ownership issues, and poor data management practices, ultimately leading to incomplete datasets. Obsolete Data Systems and Architectures: Inadequate infrastructure or outdated technologies may hinder data collection, processing, and storage. Incomplete data sets can also be due to data privacy regulations and compliance requirements which may limit access to certain data. Strategies to Ensure Data Completeness Establish Clear Data Entry Protocols: Organizations should develop clear guidelines and protocols for data entry to ensure consistency and accuracy. This includes defining data fields, formats, and validation rules to minimize errors during data entry. Implement Data Validation Checks: Automated data validation checks should be implemented to identify incomplete or inaccurate data entries in real-time. This can include range checks, format checks, and cross-field validations to ensure data accuracy and completeness. Regular Data Audits: Conducting regular audits of the data can help identify incomplete or missing data points. These audits should involve comparing the dataset against predefined standards or benchmarks to ensure completeness and accuracy. Use Data Profiling Tools: Data profiling tools can access the contents of a dataset, providing statistics such as minimum and maximum values, unique value count, missing value count etc. By leveraging these tools, organizations can proactively address data completeness issues and take corrective actions. Implement Data Quality Monitoring: Establishing a robust data quality monitoring process allows organizations to continuously monitor the completeness of their data. Alerts and notifications can be set up to flag any deviations from expected data completeness levels. Incorporate Data Governance Policies: Implementing data governance policies ensures that data completeness requirements are clearly defined and enforced across the organization. This includes assigning responsibilities for data stewardship and establishing processes for data quality management. Data Enrichment Strategies: In cases where data completeness is compromised, organizations can employ data enrichment techniques to fill in missing data points. This may involve integrating external data sources or using algorithms to extrapolate missing values based on existing data. Using Automated Tools for Complete Data Automated tools play a crucial role in ensuring the completeness and reliability of data across various domains. These tools facilitate the collection, processing, and analysis of large datasets efficiently, enabling organizations to derive valuable insights and make informed decisions. By automating tasks such as data cleaning, integration, and analysis, these tools streamline workflows and minimize errors, resulting in more accurate and actionable information. Additionally, automated data visualization enables stakeholders to understand complex patterns and trends quickly, facilitating communication and decision-making processes. Moreover, automated tools help organizations maintain data security and compliance with regulations, mitigating risks associated with data handling. LIKE.TG: Ensuring Data Completeness with Advanced No-Code Data Management LIKE.TG offers an end-to-end no-code data management platform equipped with advanced and automated capabilities for data integration, extraction, and preparation. With a wide range of features, LIKE.TG empowers users to create and maintain automated data pipelines that deliver accurate and timely data. With LIKE.TG, users can seamlessly extract and cleanse data from unstructured sources, leveraging AI-powered document processing capabilities. Users can effortlessly integrate data from diverse file sources and database providers, supported by a data pipeline builder that accommodates various formats, systems, and transfer protocols. This reduces the challenge of incompatibilities in data structures or identifiers, which often lead to incomplete or inconsistent datasets. Through the LIKE.TG Dataprep feature, users can cleanse, transform, and validate extracted data with point-and-click navigation, supported by a rich set of transformations including join, union, lookup, and aggregation. With attributes like active profiling, data quality rules, and preview-centric grids, LIKE.TG ensures data cleanliness, uniqueness, and completeness, providing users with attribute-level profile and vivid graphical representations to easily identify patterns of completeness or lack thereof. LIKE.TG also offers ease of integration, allowing users to effortlessly utilize cleaned and transformed data in analytics platforms, thus enabling informed decision-making based on comprehensive and reliable data. Achieve data completeness effortlessly with LIKE.TG today – Book a personalized demo now!

Organizations rely on high-performance data warehouses for storing and analyzing large amounts of data. An important decision in setting up a data warehouse is the choice between Star Schema vs. Snowflake Schema. The star schema simplifies the structure of a database by directly connecting dimension tables to a central fact table. The star shaped design streamlines data retrieval and analysis by consolidating related data points, thereby enhancing the efficiency and clarity of database queries.Conversely, the snowflake schema takes a more detailed approach, breaking down dimension tablesinto additional tables, resulting in more complex relationships where each branch represents a different aspect of the data. Since a chosen schema sets forth the blueprint for organizing and structuring data within the data warehouse, it’s important to understand the key differences between snowflake schema vs. star schema to make the right choice.So, in this blog, we will discuss all about star and snowflake schema, including their important characteristics, example queries, and when to use which. Let’s delve in and see what each of these schema types offer and how they differ. What is a Star Schema? Star schema is a type of data warehouse schema that consists of one or more fact tables referencing multiple dimension tables. This schema revolves around a central table called the “fact table.” It’s surrounded by several directly connected tables called the “dimension tables.” Additionally, there are foreign keys that link data from one table to another, establishing a relationship between the two by using the primary key of another table. This process serves as a means of cross-referencing, ensuring connectivity and coherence within the database structure. The fact table contains quantitative data, often called measures or metrics. The measures are typically numeric, like speed, cost, quantity, and weight, and they can be aggregated. The fact table contains foreign key references to the dimension tables, which contain non-numerical elements. These are descriptive attributes like product details (name, category, brand), customer information (name, address, segment), time indicators (date, month, year), etc. Each dimension table represents a specific aspect or dimension of the data. A dimension usually has a primary key column and is referenced by the fact table through foreign key relationships. In a star schema: The fact table, which holds the primary metrics, is located at the center. Each dimension table is directly linked to the fact table but not to the other dimension tables, hence having a star-like structure. The simplicity of Star schema facilitates aggregated reporting and analysis and streamlines data retrieval operations. This is because the queries typically involve fewer joins compared to more normalized schemas. The reduced complexity and simple structure optimize data access and processing, which is well-suited for cloud-based data warehousing solutions. Moreover, it’s clear delineation between dimensions and facts enables users to analyze information across various dimensions easily. This makes star schema a foundational model in business intelligence applications, too. Characteristics of Star Schema Some main characteristics of a star schema are as follows: Central fact table: There’s a primary fact table containing metrics in the center. It represents activities, events, and business transactions. Dimension tables: They surround the fact table and represent the specific aspect of the business context. Dimension tables show descriptive attributes. Primary-foreign key relationships: The link between the fact and dimension table is established through primary-foreign key relationships, allowing for the aggregation of data across different dimensions. Connection with dimension tables: There are no connections made between the dimension tables. All the dimension tables are connected to the central fact table only. Denormalized structure: The dimension tables are often denormalized, which is beneficial in reducing the need for joins during queries as the necessary attributes are included within a single dimension instead of splitting them across multiple tables. Optimized query performance: Features like direct relationships between fact and dimension tables and the denormalized structure contribute to optimized query performance. This enables star schemas to handle complex analytical tasks and is thus a good fit for data analysis and reporting. Star schemas are ideal for applications involving multidimensional analysis of data, such as OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). OLAP tools support the star schema structure efficiently to perform roll-up, drill-down, aggregation, and other analytical operations across different dimensions. What is a Snowflake Schema? A snowflake schema is an extension of the star schema model, where dimension tables are normalized into multiple related tables resembling the shape of a snowflake. In the snowflake schema, there’s a central fact table that holds quantitative measures. This fact table is directly linked to dimension tables. These dimension tables are normalized into sub-dimensions that hold specific attributes within a dimension. Compared to a star schema, snowflake schema reduces data redundancy and improves data integrity, but it introduces additional complexity to the queries due to the need for more joins. This complexity often affects the performance and understandability of the dimension model. Characteristics of Snowflake Schema The following are the main characteristics of a snowflake schema: Normalization: In a snowflake schema, dimension tables are normalized, unlike in a star schema, where the tables are denormalized. This means that attributes within dimension tables are broken down into multiple related tables. Hierarchical structure: The normalization of dimension tables creates a hierarchical structure that gives a snowflake-like appearance. Relationship between tables: Normalization leads to additional join relationships between the normalized tables that increase the complexity of queries. Performance: Joining multiple normalized tables in a snowflake schema necessitates more computing power due to increased query complexity, potentially impacting performance. Data integrity: Snowflake schemas reduce redundancy and eliminate update anomalies. This ensures data is stored in a consistent and normalized manner. Flexibility: Snowflake schemas provide flexibility in organizing and managing complex data relationships that give a more structured approach to data analysis. Key differences between Star and Snowflake Schema 1. Architecture The dimension tables are denormalized in the star schema. This means they are represented as single tables having all attributes contained within them. The structure of this schema resembles a star, showcasing a fact table in the center and dimension tables radiating out from it. A snowflake schema, on the other hand, has normalized dimension tables. This means they are broken down into multiple related tables. Such a normalization creates a hierarchical structure that resembles a snowflake, having additional levels of tables branching off from the main dimension tables. 2. Normalization Star schemas are denormalized, where all attributes are within a single table for each dimension. This denormalization is done intentionally to speed up performance. However, its downside is that there might be data redundancy, i.e., the same data appearing in multiple dimension tables, requiring more storage. A snowflake schema represents a normalized dimension table, with attributes broken down into multiple related tables. Snowflake schema design avoids data redundancy, improves data quality, and uses less storage space than a star schema. 3. Query Performance Considering there are fewer join operations and a simpler table structure in a star schema, the query performance is usually better compared to the snowflake schema. On the other hand, snowflake schema has complex join operations, which require access to data across multiple normalized tables. As a result, snowflake schema generally results in slower query performance. 4. Maintenance Depending on several factors, such as data complexity and updates and storage space, maintaining both star and snowflake schemas can be challenging. However, star schemas are generally easier to maintain compared to snowflake schemas due to their fewer join operations that simplify query optimization. However, the denormalized structure contributes to some level of redundancy, which requires careful management to improve the accuracy of data analysis and insights. The normalization process in snowflake schemas increases complexity and makes it difficult to maintain. The joins require additional attention to maintain acceptable performance levels. Moreover, managing updates and inserts in the snowflake schema is more complex as there’s a need to propagate changes across multiple related tables. This can be compared to a star schema, where data is more concentrated in fewer tables. Updates typically affect only one or a few tables, making them simpler to manage. Example Query Let’s take the example of “Employee Performance Evaluation by Department and Training Courses Attended” to see how snowflake and star schemas are formed. Star Schema: This query involves querying the fact table containing performance evaluation data and joining it with the dimension tables that represent departments, employees, and training courses. This fact table typically has a foreign key relationship with dimension tables. For instance, the dimension tables can include department dimensions (department ID, manager, name, etc.), employee dimensions (employee ID, job, title, etc.), and training course dimensions (course ID, name, duration). Star schema is commonly used for simpler analytical needs where denormalization is preferred for performance reasons. Snowflake Schema: In a snowflake schema, the dimension tables are further normalized into sub-dimensions, such as department hierarchy, training course categories, and employee details. The additional joins needed to access the normalized data slow down the execution times. Star Schema Vs. Snowflake Schema: Choosing the Right Schema for Your Organization Both the star schema and snowflake schema offer unique advantages, but choosing the right one for your enterprise data warehouse requires careful consideration. Here are some important factors to keep in mind when deciding between a star and snowflake schema: Analytical needs: Evaluate the types of analyses and queries that your business requires, considering whether they lean towards more complex hierarchies or simple, straightforward analyses. If your business requires straightforward analyses with minimal complexity, a star schema might be preferable due to its simpler structure and fewer join operations. On the other hand, if your analyses involve complex hierarchies and relationships between dimensions, a snowflake schema may be more suitable for its ability to represent these intricate relationships in a more organized manner. Scalability: Consider future growth and scalability requirements to ensure the chosen schema can accommodate the changing data needs and scale effectively. For smaller data sets and simpler queries star schema’s denormalized structure performs better. In contrast, snowflake schema’s normalized approach may provide greater scalability and flexibility to handle larger datasets and more complex queries as your data needs grow over time. Data Volume: Assess the effect of massive datasets on storage costs and capabilities before making your schema selection. Star schema’s denormalized design may lead to higher storage costs due to redundancy, whereas a snowflake schema’s normalized structure can help optimize storage efficiency by reducing redundancy. If storage costs are a significant concern, a snowflake schema may be a more cost-effective option for managing large volumes of data. Understand your data: Analyze the structure and complexity of your data, including the relationships between different analyses. This will help in picking the right schema for your business. If your data exhibits a high degree of normalization and requires detailed analysis with many-to-many relationships between dimensions, a snowflake schema may be more appropriate. However, if your data is relatively simple and can be represented with fewer dimensions and straightforward relationships, a star schema may suffice. Goals: Determine whether you require quick insights or comprehensive details. Opt for star schema for quick reporting and snowflake schema for detailed analysis. A star schema is well-suited to faster reporting and simple analysis, making it ideal for organizations that prioritize speed and agility in decision-making. In contrast, a snowflake schema offers more granularity and detail, making it suitable for organizations that require in-depth analysis and a deeper understanding of their data. Conclusion Star schema and snowflake schema have their merits and demerits. One of the reasons the star schema is more common is its simplified structure. While star schema is less complex and has a quicker query execution, it can result in data redundancy and scalability limitations, which the snowflake schema addresses through its normalization of dimension tables. Whether you choose star schema or snowflake schema, you can significantly simplify your data warehouse development journey with automation. LIKE.TG Data Warehouse Builder automates every aspect of building a data warehouse. From schema design to data integration and beyond, LIKE.TG DW Builder enables you to build and deploy a fully functional data warehouse for your organization—all without writing a single line of code. Experience hassle-free data warehouse development with LIKE.TG. Start your free trial today and see how it smooths out the process. Simplify complex data integration with a user-friendly, no-code approach. Explore how LIKE.TG Data Warehouse Builder transforms data integration, enabling businesses to leverage the power of their data without needing technical expertise. Check Demo Now!

Every digital interaction generates data. This data can provide invaluable insights and drive effective decision-making when managed effectively. However, according to a survey, up to 68% of datawithin an enterprise remains unused, representing an untapped resource for driving business growth. One way of unlocking this potential lies in two critical concepts: data governance and information governance. Data governance focuses on the technical and operational aspects of managing data, while information governance looks at the wider policies, procedures, and strategies guiding data usage. They are different, yet they complement each other, providing a holistic approach to managing data. Understanding Data Governance Data governance is a set of processes, policies, standards, and metrics that control and manage the use of data within organizations. Its primary purpose is to ensure organizational data assets’ quality, integrity, security, and effective use. The key objectives of data governance include: Enhancing Clear Ownership: Assigning roles to ensure accountability and effective management of data assets. Ensuring Data Quality: Implementing measures to improve data accuracy, consistency, and reliability. Implementing Lifecycle Management: Establishing efficient data creation, storage, and disposal processes. Protecting Access Controls: Implementing robust mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access or modification. Understanding Information Governance Information governance is a broader term that includes data governance within its framework. It refers to the strategies, policies, and procedures that manage and utilize all information within an organization. It’s a strategic approach that positions information as a crucial asset, enhancing decision-making and organizational growth. Information governance ensures that all available information is used effectively, aiding in compliance efforts and achieving strategic goals. The main objectives of information governance include: Ensuring Regulatory Compliance: Aligning practices with laws and regulations to mitigate risks and maintain trust. Fostering Knowledge Sharing: Promoting collaboration to leverage collective expertise for innovation and improvement. Implementing Security Measures: Enforcing encryption and monitoring to protect sensitive information. Streamlining Record Keeping: Improving processes for efficient organization, retrieval, and retention of records. Information Governance vs. Data Governance: Key Differences While data and information governance play integral roles in managing an organization’s data and information assets, they differ in scope and focus. Aspect Data Governance Information Governance Focus Management of all kinds of data assets Management of all forms of information assets Objectives Ensuring the accuracy, consistency, security, and compliance of data assets Understanding the business value and compliance needs of the information assets Activities Data quality management, metadata management, data privacy and security Document management, records management, compliance Scope Technical aspects of data management within systems Broader perspective, including information related to documents, knowledge, and intellectual property Stakeholders Data stewards, IT departments Executives, Legal teams, IT departments, Information security teams, etc. To summarize, while data governance focuses on managing data assets, information governance widens the lens to ensure that all information assets are effectively and compliantly utilized, aligning with the overall organizational objectives. Real-World Scenarios of Data Governance and Information Governance in Action Learning how data governance and information governance approaches are applied across industries is important to understand their practical relevance. Here are some real-world scenarios where each approach is effectively implemented: Data Governance E-commerce Quality Assurance: In e-commerce, data governance ensures product quality consistency. Platforms can standardize product information and monitor data quality, which enhances customer trust, minimizes returns, and drives competitiveness. Healthcare Data Security: Data governance is vital to protect patient information. By implementing strict access controls and encryption measures, healthcare organizations safeguard sensitive data, ensuring patient privacy and confidentiality. Information Governance Financial Compliance Management: Financial institutions maintain regulatory compliance through information governance. They can mitigate compliance risks and maintain stakeholder trust by identifying and organizing data subject to regulations, such as Dodd-Frank or Basel III, and enforcing the corresponding policies. Education Knowledge Management: Educational institutions optimize knowledge sharing with information governance. By organizing academic resources and implementing access controls, institutions support teaching and learning goals, fostering innovation and collaboration. How do Data Governance and Information Governance Work Together? Data governance and information governance are complementary frameworks that effectively manage organizational data and information assets. Integrating data governance and information governance practices helps address the technical and business aspects of data and information management. Data governance ensures data integrity, accuracy, and security within organizational systems. In contrast, information governance ensures that all information assets, including documents, records, and intellectual property, are managed effectively throughout their lifecycle. Benefits of Implementing Data and Information Governance Together Combining data governance and information governance practices enables organizations to adopt a comprehensive approach to governance, covering all aspects of managing data and information. This holistic approach enables organizations to: Maximize Data and Information Value: Organizations can derive maximum value from their data and information resources by effectively managing their data and information assets. Data governance ensures accurate, consistent, and secure data, while information governance ensures that information assets are utilized to maximize their value to the organization. Mitigate Risks and Ensure Compliance: Integrating data governance and information governance practices helps organizations mitigate risks associated with data breaches, privacy violations, and non-compliance with regulations. Data governance ensures compliance with data-related regulations and standards. However, Information governance ensures compliance with broader information management requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA, enhancing regulatory compliance and risk management efforts. Enhance Decision-Making and Innovation: Integrated governance practices provide a comprehensive framework for managing data and information assets, which can support informed decision-making and drive innovation. Data governance ensures decision-makers access accurate, reliable, and secure data. Information governance ensures that relevant information assets are accessible, well-managed, and compliant, facilitating collaboration and innovation. Best Practices for Implementing Data and Information Governance Together Given the benefits of combining these two approaches, How can users effectively implement them? Integrating data and information governance practices requires a strategic approach and adherence to best practices. Here are seven best practices to achieve this: Establish Clear Policies and Frameworks: Define clear data governance and information governance policies and frameworks that align with organizational objectives and regulatory requirements. These policies should outline roles, responsibilities, and processes for managing data and information assets across the organization. Engage Stakeholders Across Departments: Collaboration and buy-in from stakeholders across departments are crucial for successfully implementing governance practices. Engage key stakeholders, including business units, IT teams, legal, compliance, and risk management departments, to ensure that governance policies address the needs and priorities of all stakeholders. Define Data and Information Assets: Identify and classify data and information assets based on their sensitivity, criticality, and value to the organization. This step involves creating a data catalogas a centralized inventory system for easy data discovery. The catalog categorizes assets by type, ownership, and usage, offering a comprehensive view of available data. Implement Data and Information Lifecycle Management: Develop and implement processes for managing the lifecycle of data and information assets, from creation and acquisition to retention and disposal. This step includes establishing data retention policies, archiving procedures, and disposal mechanisms to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and mitigate data and information exposure risks. Ensure Data Quality and Integrity: Implement data quality management practices to maintain data assets’ accuracy, completeness, and consistency. These practices involve establishing data quality standards, conducting data profiling and cleansing activities, and monitoring data quality metrics regularly to identify and address issues proactively. Provide Ongoing Training and Awareness: Educate employees about the importance of data governance and information governance practices through training programs, workshops, and communication campaigns. Foster a culture of data stewardship and information security awareness to encourage adherence to governance policies and promote responsible data and information management practices. Continuous Monitoring and Improvement: Regularly monitor and assess the effectiveness of governance practices through audits, reviews, and performance metrics. This process involves identifying areas for improvement based on stakeholder feedback and changing organizational needs and regulations. Additionally, prioritize adaptability by continually refining governance frameworks and methods to address the evolving demands of data and information management. Investing in technology solutions, such as data management solutions, data governance platforms, document management systems, and metadata management tools, is important to support governance practices effectively. These tools can automate data classification, enforce governance policies, and provide visibility into data and information assets across the organization. By implementing these best practices and leveraging solutions like LIKE.TG, businesses can unlock the full potential of their data assets while mitigating risks and maximizing opportunities for innovation and growth. Conclusion Data governance and information governance are pivotal for teams looking to achieve efficient data and information management within their organization. They form the basis for seamless company-wide data access and collaborative, cross-functional decision-making. They foster trust in data by establishing clear data integrity, security, and compliance protocols. As a result, teams can confidently use insights to make informed decisions. LIKE.TG’s data governance solution offers a centralized platform for overseeing company data assets effortlessly, eliminating the need for coding. Integrated within LIKE.TG Data Stack, our comprehensive data management solution, LIKE.TG Data Governance empowers business users to handle the entire data pipeline seamlessly. Moreover, it ensures the timely availability of the right data assets to the right teams – all within a single, unified tool. Are you looking for guidance to implement data and information governance? Contact us now.

Data forms the foundation of the modern insurance industry, where every operation relies on digitized systems, including risk assessment, policy underwriting, customer service, and regulatory compliance. Given this reliance, insurance companies must process and manage data effectively to gain valuable insight, mitigate risks, and streamline operations. A strategic approach to data management is needed to meet these demands — particularly a greater focus on high data quality and robust governance to guarantee accuracy, security, and compliance. The Dual Imperative: Upholding Data Quality and Governance Data quality and governance are essential data management components, particularly in the insurance industry. These elements are crucial for its smooth and effective functioning. Data Quality: Ensuring Accurate Decision-Making Reliable and accurate data is critical for assessing and pricing risks associated with policyholders. It enables insurers to set appropriate premiums and coverage limits, minimizing underwriting losses. Moreover, accurate data is vital for meeting regulatory requirements, as regulators mandate the provision of verifiable data for financial reporting and compliance purposes. Additionally, high-quality data enhances decision-making within insurance companies, allowing them to effectively identify market trends, anticipate shifts in customer preferences, and tailor products and services. Key aspects of data quality include: Conducting accurate risk assessment Developing reliable pricing strategies Ensuring data integrity and verifiability for regulatory compliance Data Governance: Safeguarding Sensitive Information Data quality complements governance, which includes the policies, procedures, and controls put in place to regulate data collection, storage, access, and usage within an organization. Effective governance practices safeguard sensitive information, mainly Personally Identifiable Information (PII), from unauthorized access, breaches, and misuse. Adhering to robust governance frameworks allows insurers to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations. As a result, it helps them mitigate legal risks and maintain stakeholder trust. Important aspects of governance include: Establishing data handling policies Implementing access controls Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) The synergy between data quality and governance is crucial for the insurance industry’s integrity, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder trust. Prioritizing both aspects allows insurers to improve risk management practices, increase operational efficiency, and uphold the security and reliability of sensitive data throughout their operations. Strategies for Effective Data Governance and Quality Management Implementing effective data governance and quality management practices is essential for the insurance industry. Here are some best practices to consider: Establish Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Introduce a system for requesting and approving access to data assets. This system, guided by clear policies and procedures, includes cataloging assets, defining ownership, and assigning roles and responsibilities. It operates under a well-structured governance framework, ensuring accountability and consistency in data management. Implement Robust Data Governance Frameworks: Adopt a structured approach to data governance by implementing frameworks such as COBIT, DAMA, or ISO 8000. These frameworks provide guidelines and best practices for managing data assets, ensuring data quality, and mitigating risks associated with data management. Invest in Data Quality Tools and Technologies: Use data quality tools to assess, cleanse, and monitor data quality across the organization. These tools can help identify and rectify data errors, inconsistencies, and duplications, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of data used for decision-making and reporting. Provide Ongoing Training and Education: Offer training programs and educational resources to employees at all levels to enhance their understanding of data governance principles and best practices. Ensure employees have the resources to manage data and adhere to data governance policies effectively. Implement Data Security Measures: Implement strong security protocols to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. This includes encrypting data, implementing access controls, conducting regular security audits, and staying up-to-date with data privacy regulations. Establish Data Quality Metrics and KPIs: Define metrics to measure the effectiveness of data governance and quality management initiatives. Monitor and track these metrics regularly to identify areas for improvement. This monitoring helps ensure continuous enhancement of data quality and governance practices. How LIKE.TG Drives Data Quality and Governance in Insurance Operations As discussed above, investing in the right data management tools is crucial for ensuring data quality and governance. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of enterprise-level data management solutions. Its solutions are designed to handle complex data structures, making it an ideal choice for the insurance industry. Delivering high-performance, scalable, and intuitive data management capabilities, LIKE.TG empowers insurers to make informed decisions based on accurate, timely, and reliable data. Data Quality Management with LIKE.TG LIKE.TG’s data integration solution is a robust platform designed to ensure the highest data quality standards for the insurance industry. It implements a series of checks and balances throughout the data integration process, validating data at every stage, from extraction and transformation to loading. This rigorous validation process is crucial in the insurance industry, where data accuracy, such as policy details, claims data, and customer information, directly affects the level of service provided to policyholders. LIKE.TG’s solution identifies and manages data inconsistencies, duplicates, and errors, ensuring the data used in decision-making processes is accurate and reliable. Moreover, it standardizes data formats, ensuring uniformity and consistency across different data sources. Access to reliable data is particularly important in the insurance industry, where data is often sourced from various channels, including agents, brokers, and digital platforms. By standardizing data formats, LIKE.TG’s solution eliminates discrepancies and enhances the accuracy of data-driven decisions. LIKE.TG’s Data Governance Solution LIKE.TG’s data governance solution provides a robust framework for managing access to sensitive insurance data. This solution seamlessly integrates with LIKE.TG’s data integration solution, enhancing the overall data management process. A key feature of LIKE.TG’s data governance solution is its ability to centralize access to all data assets, enabling seamless sharing across departments within the insurance company. While ensuring easy access to data, the solution implements controls to restrict access appropriately. This balance between data accessibility and control is crucial in the insurance industry, where different teams need specific datasets to carry out functions like claim processing, risk assessment, policy management, and customer service. Additionally, LIKE.TG’s solution ensures that only authorized personnel can access sensitive insurance information, which helps protect PII. The solution achieves this through request-based access controls. Under this system, a user is required to request access to a specific asset formally, and the asset owner has the authority to grant or deny this access. This feature is particularly crucial in the insurance industry, where sensitive data such as policyholder details, claim histories, and financial information must be strictly controlled and protected. Use Case Scenario Let’s consider ABC Insurance, a large-scale insurance company, to understand how LIKE.TG’s solutions can be applied in a real-world scenario. It relies on various data sources for risk assessment and policy management. However, disparate data sources and inconsistent data management practices have resulted in poor data quality. This has led to significant challenges: Inaccurate Risk Assessments: The company struggles to accurately assess risks associated with policyholders, impacting their ability to set appropriate premiums and coverage limits. Data Breach Concerns: Inadequate data governance measures have left ABC Insurance vulnerable to data breaches, potentially exposing sensitive customer information to unauthorized access and compromising data security. Implementing LIKE.TG’s Solutions: ABC Insurance implements LIKE.TG’s comprehensive data management and governance solutions to address these challenges, leveraging specific features to tackle their issues head-on. Enhancing Data Quality: LIKE.TG’s solution offers advanced data profiling, cleansing, and standardization features. For example, ABC Insurance can apply validation checks such as ensuring that all policyholder addresses are in a valid format (e.g., street address, city, state, zip code). These data quality rules ensure data accuracy and consistency across the organization. Ensuring Robust Data Governance: LIKE.TG’s data governance solution enables ABC Insurance to establish granular access controls, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive customer data. For instance, at ABC Insurance, access to policyholder medical records is granted to members of the Underwriting Department only upon their formal request and subsequent approval by the authorized asset owner. Furthermore, access to specific types of information within these records, such as sensitive personal information can be restricted to only authorized personnel within the department. Results and Benefits: Following the implementation of LIKE.TG’s solutions, ABC Insurance experiences significant improvements across various aspects of their operations: Accurate Risk Assessments: LIKE.TG’s data profiling, cleansing, and standardization features allow ABC Insurance to achieve greater accuracy in risk assessments, enabling it to set appropriate premiums and coverage limits, ultimately reducing underwriting losses. Enhanced Data Security: LIKE.TG’s data governance solution allows ABC Insurance to establish robust access controls, reducing unauthorized access to sensitive customer information. Improved Decision-Making: Access to reliable data enables ABC Insurance to make informed decisions, identify market trends, and develop tailored products and services, which improves business outcomes and drives success. Conclusion A growing demand for personalized customer service and stricter data protection rules will increase the insurance industry’s reliance on data. Hence, it becomes essential for insurance companies to invest in advanced data management solutions like LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG offers a unified, user-friendly solution combining data quality management and governance. Its automation capabilities streamline complex data processes, allowing insurance companies to focus more on strategic decision-making and less on manual data tasks. LIKE.TG’s solutions empower insurance companies to improve data accuracy, enhance security, and ensure efficient data management processes. Plus, the flexibility and scalability of LIKE.TG’s platform makes it a future-proof investment to deal with the surge in data volume. Take the next step in your data management journey. Download a free trial of LIKE.TG’s solution today and see how it can empower your insurance company!

What is Metadata Governance? Metadata governance is the systematic approach to managing metadata, or data about data, to ensure it is accurate, consistently formatted, and securely stored. The main goal of metadata governance is to improve data quality, ensure data privacy, and streamline metadata management. As metadata provides the necessary details about data, such as when it was created, by whom, and its content or purpose, it becomes easier for employees to find, understand, and trust the data they use. It gives the needed context and unique characteristics to data. For example, in a corporate setting, metadata about a sales report could include information about its creation date, the department that created it, and the type of data it contains. Metadata as a Foundation of Data Governance Metadata serves as the foundation of data governance by offering the contextual framework for understanding, managing, and using data within an organization. It guides the data governance structure with essential data attributes and usage information, enabling informed decisions about data assets. In data governance, metadata ensures that data definitions and relationships are consistently applied across the organization, eliminating ambiguities and fostering a unified approach to data interpretation. It also enhances data discoverability, allowing users to quickly find relevant data for analysis, reporting, and decision-making. Importance of Metadata Governance Governing metadata is an important component of the data governance framework. Without proper metadata governance, organizations risk data misinterpretation, compliance breaches, and inefficiencies in data use. For instance, without clear metadata governance, two departments can use the same data differently, leading to inconsistencies and potential errors in reporting. Metadata governance ensures consistency by defining and enforcing rules for how data is described, accessed, and used across an organization. It also encompasses procedures that manage data’s lifecycle, enabling uniform understanding and use of data, thus preventing discrepancies in how different departments interpret and report data. Main Components of Metadata Governance Effective metadata governance includes the following six components: Metadata Standards and Guidelines These are rules outlining how metadata should be structured and formatted. They determine what metadata to collect, how to classify and categorize it, and conventions for naming and describing it. Roles and Responsibilities Clearly defined roles ensure each stakeholder understands their part in metadata governance. This step includes defining who creates, maintains, accesses, and makes decisions about metadata. Metadata Repository A centralized database stores and manages metadata. It should be easily accessible to stakeholders and equipped with search capabilities for finding and retrieving specific metadata. Processes and Procedures It details how metadata is created, updated, and managed. They also define how metadata quality is unaffected through validation, discrepancy resolution, and change tracking. Tools and Technology Systems and software used to create, manage, and access metadata. These tools should support organizational standards and processes while being user-friendly. Metrics and Performance These assess the effectiveness of metadata governance. Data quality metrics allow organizations to measure the health of metadata and maintain its accuracy. The measures generally include metadata accuracy, completeness, consistency, and stakeholder engagement level. Advantages of Effective Metadata Governance Implementing effective data governance brings numerous benefits to the organization by streamlining the operations and optimizing the data as a strategic asset. Improved Data Quality By providing clear context and meaning for data, metadata governance ensures accurate, consistent, and complete information. This reliable foundation leads to more trustworthy analysis and insights. Faster Decisions Finding and understanding the data an organization needs becomes easy with metadata governance, reducing search time and allowing businesses to make quicker, data-driven decisions. Stronger Collaboration Through metadata governance, everyone in the organization uses and interprets data the same way. This shared knowledge base allows for more effective teamwork and consistent use of data across various projects and initiatives. Easy Compliance In industries like power and energy, data privacy regulations are important. Metadata governance helps manage and control data effectively, ensuring compliance with legal requirements. Usable Data High-quality, well-documented data becomes more valuable with strong metadata governance, opening doors to monetization opportunities with customers, partners, and other stakeholders. Enriched Data Management Strong metadata governance strengthens the entire data management approach. Solid Foundation: By meticulously managing metadata, organizations build a strong base for their data. A strong base improves the organization, quality, and usability of information. Clear Guidelines: Metadata governance sets clear rules for handling data, making it easier and faster to manage the data assets. Improved Workflows: Metadata governance optimizes the data lifecycle from creating and storing data to accessing and disposing of it. An optimized system leads to smoother data workflows and a more efficient system. Five Steps to Implement Metadata Governance Setting up a successful metadata governance program is a strategic process that requires thoughtful planning, precise action, and continuous oversight. Assess the Current Metadata Landscape The first step is to take stock of the existing metadata landscape. This involves identifying what metadata is currently being captured, how it’s being stored, and the systems in use. For example, a retail company examines its product information management system to understand how product attributes, such as size, color, and price, are described and categorized. This initial assessment helps pinpoint gaps and opportunities for improvement. Define Clear Goals and Objectives Next, organizations must outline specific goals and objectives for their metadata governance. An example objective could be enhancing data quality for better analytics or improving data sharing across departments. Establish specific goals like enhancing product metadata accuracy to boost online shopping experiences, providing a focused direction, and enabling progress tracking. Establish a Governance Structure Creating a governance structure means defining who is responsible for managing and overseeing metadata within the organization. This step involves assigning roles like a metadata manager or governance committee and detailing their responsibilities. For instance, the metadata manager might ensure that product metadata across all online platforms remains consistent and up to date while the governance committee oversees the overall strategy and resolves any disputes. Develop and Enforce Policies and Standards With roles and responsibilities in place, the next step is to develop clear policies like metadata access, quality, and distribution. These guidelines dictate how metadata should be formatted, the taxonomy to be used, and procedures for updating metadata. A financial services firm, for instance, would establish policies around tagging financial transactions with metadata that includes the transaction type, amount, date, and involved parties, ensuring consistency and facilitating easier reporting and analysis. Regularly Review and Refine Practices Metadata governance isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. Regular reviews and updates are required to ensure the practices remain relevant and effective. This step could involve periodic audits of metadata quality, surveys of users to understand new needs, or assessments of the governance structure to identify areas for improvement. For example, a media company would review its content metadata practices annually to ensure that new content types are adequately captured and described. Opportunities in Metadata Governance Companies can optimize their data management resources and gain a competitive edge by strategically leveraging opportunities in metadata governance. Encouraging Team Collaboration One of the key opportunities lies in collaboration across different departments and teams. When diverse teams come together to share their knowledge and best practices about metadata, the organization benefits from a more comprehensive understanding of its data assets. This collaborative approach can develop standardized metadata practices keeping them consistent across the organization, enhancing overall data quality management. For instance, creating cross-functional working groups dedicated to metadata governance can facilitate discussions on common challenges and opportunities. These groups can work on developing shared metadata standards, guidelines, and vocabularies that all departments can adopt, creating consistency and facilitating smoother data integration efforts. Advanced Metadata Solutions Modern data management tools and platforms offer features and capabilities that help organizations govern and manage data, including metadata. In contrast, dedicated metadata management tools offer functionalities such as automation of metadata collection and processing, enhanced data cataloging, and more efficient metadata asset integration. These features significantly reduce the manual effort involved in metadata governance and management, allowing teams to focus on more strategic data governance initiatives. Implementing a metadata management solution that integrates seamlessly with existing data systems can simplify cataloging data assets, maintaining up-to-date metadata records, and providing users easy access to the information they need. For example, automated metadata tagging and classification systems can help organizations quickly categorize their data assets based on predefined rules, making data easier to find, understand, and use. Strategies for Effective Metadata Governance To fully capitalize on the opportunities, organizations should consider the following strategies: Promote Metadata Literacy: Educate all employees on the importance of metadata and its role in effective data governance. Organizations can provide training on how to create, use, and manage metadata correctly. Establish Clear Metadata Governance Policies: Develop and implement clear policies that outline metadata management roles, responsibilities, and procedures. Such policies enable everyone to understand their part in maintaining high-quality metadata. Measure Success: Define clear metrics to measure the effectiveness of metadata governance initiatives. Businesses can track improvements in data quality, reductions in data discovery times, or increases in user satisfaction with data systems. Final Words Integrating metadata governance into a company’s data governance strategy transforms the value of its data. It enhances data reliability and usability, making it a strategic asset that can drive decision-making and innovation. The journey towards effective metadata governance requires a thoughtful approach, which involves understanding the current landscape, refining practices, and leveraging new opportunities for collaboration and technological enhancement. LIKE.TG simplifies metadata governance efforts by automating metadata discovery, categorization, and management – empowering users to complete these tasks more accurately and in less time. With LIKE.TG, businesses can establish a metadata governance framework that enhances data quality and facilitates faster decision-making. Implement Metadata Governance to Optimize Data Management Looking to enhance metadata governance? Try LIKE.TG for free for 14 days and optimize your data management. Experience how LIKE.TG streamlines data governance processes. Learn More

An effective data governance strategy is crucial to manage and oversee data effectively, especially as data becomes more critical and technologies evolve. This strategic approach to data governance aligns with findings from a McKinsey survey, suggesting that companies with solid data governance strategies are twice as likely to prioritize important data — leading to better decision-making and organizational success. However, creating a solid strategy requires careful planning and execution, involving several key steps and responsibilities. What is a Data Governance Strategy? A data governance strategy is a comprehensive framework that outlines how data is named, stored, and processed. A vital aspect of this strategy includes sharing data seamlessly. This objective is to ensure data integrity, accessibility, and compliance with regulatory frameworks. Building upon this foundation, a good data strategy is a blueprint for organizations to achieve their overarching data aims. It does so by adding specific details to the broader goals. For instance, if an organization aims to launch a new product, a good strategy will ensure that up-to-date data backs up the launch and related decisions. It would focus on what the customer wants, how the market is behaving, and what other competitors are doing, all through the lens of fresh, accurate data. In short, a data governance strategy includes the following: Establishing principles, policies, and procedures for data management. Developing a strategic plan with resource allocation and timeline. Implementing governance bodies to oversee compliance. Aligning the overarching data strategy. Ensuring ongoing monitoring and adaptation. Three important components of data governance strategy ensure an organization’s practical management of data assets. These components offer a comprehensive plan for maximizing the value of data assets. Data Governance Framework A data governance framework is the backbone and foundational structure of the data governance strategy. It encompasses a set of rules, principles, policies, and processes that govern data collection, storage, and use. Under the data governance framework, organizations consider questions like: What standards and policies are in place to manage data? Who is responsible for various data governance roles? What are data privacy and security protocols? How will they monitor data access and sharing? Data Governance Roadmap A data governance roadmap essentially outlines the strategic plan and timeline for implementing the data governance framework. The goal is to identify key milestones, initiatives, and activities for successfully executing a data governance strategy. Think of it as a project plan that guides an organization to where it is now and where it wants to be regarding data governance. In a governance strategy, the roadmap identifies areas needing improvement, areas performing well, and those that have not met expectations, enhancing data utilization and strategy performance. Under the data governance roadmap, organizations consider questions like: What resources, such as tools and budget, are required? What are the key milestones and what is the timeline being considered for each stage? What projects are planned to enhance data governance? How will the KPIs be measured and reported? How will the KPIs be measured and reported? Data Governance Program A data governance program executes policies defined in a data governance framework guided by the strategic direction set in the roadmap. In simple terms, it deals with the operationalization aspect of any data governance strategy, which is needed to ensure that the principles and plans turn into concrete actions and outcomes. Under a data governance program, organizations consider questions like: How are data governance principles applied in daily operations? How is the impact of data governance programs on quality and business outcomes measured? How is cross-functional collaboration facilitated? How are the data quality issues identified and resolved within the strategy? Why is a Data Governance Strategy Needed? IDC predicts that by 2025, the worldwide volume of data is expected to expand by 163 zettabytes, covering information across physical systems, devices, and clouds. Processing and managing such a large amount of data requires an effective data governance strategy. It is needed to navigate the complexities of data systems. A data governance strategy helps with the following concerns: Need for Compliance It helps establish clear rules and procedures to ensure adherence to relevant regulations like GDPR. This strategy helps prevent data mishaps and builds a culture where data is handled wisely, protecting the company’s image. Data Security A good data governance strategy also includes measures to protect the data from breaches. By effectively implementing access controls, authentication mechanisms, data masking, and other security measures, teams can protect sensitive information effectively. Cost Reduction It helps reduce operational costs by reducing errors and redundancies in the data. Data governance strategies promote seamless data sharing; hence, fewer resources are spent on data maintenance, contributing to overall cost savings. Employee Productivity It clearly defines roles and responsibilities for data management. This clarity leads to employees spending less time searching for information and dealing with complex data systems, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks and projects. Better Decision-making A good data governance strategy equals data integrity, and it ensures decision-makers have access to timely and reliable data. This results in better strategic outcomes and, ultimately, better business performance. Building a Data Governance Strategy for Your Organization Here are five actionable steps to build an effective data governance strategy for your organization: 1. Assess Current Data Management State Evaluating the current data state is the foundation for an effective data governance strategy. To effectively govern data, start by understanding what the data entails and whether it aligns with the objectives of data of the data governance strategy. Here is how to approach it in detail: Catalog Your Data Identify and map out data by clearly outlining each data set within the organization. This process includes structured and unstructured data on digital servers, online platforms, manual records, and cloud repositories. One tip is automating your data cataloging. Automated data solutions allow organizations to have a comprehensive data overview, thus making it possible to more effectively understand and interpret data as indexed in a data catalog. Review and Identify Gaps After cataloging, evaluate how the data is stored, managed, and used. Consider any procedures related to data quality and security that are currently in place. Closely look for mismatches between existing data practices and the ideal state or regulatory standards and collaborate with different departments to gather insights on their data usage. 2. Define Goals and Objectives For a strategy to be successful, it needs a clear direction. This step begins with defining the data governance goals. The significance of establishing well-defined goals and objectives is deeply rooted in the strategy’s capacity to facilitate quick and seamless data sharing. When creating a plan, ensure that goals are clear and cover everything from big to small targets. For instance, a data governance strategy can have the following goals: Achieving 100% compliance with data privacy regulations. Reducing data-related errors by 50% within the next year. Enhancing data quality through routine audits. Streamlining data sharing between departments. Here is how to approach defining goals in a data governance strategy: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) For each goal, define clear KPIs that will help measure progress. The KPIs can include metrics like the reduction in data errors, improvement in data accessibility, or the number of staff trained in data governance practices. Set Priority for Each Goal Not all goals can be handled at once. Prioritize data governance strategy goals based on their urgency and impact on the organization. Start with the most impactful and urgent goals, such as ensuring full compliance with GDPR/CCPA regulations within 6-8 months to avoid legal penalties. Try the SMART Approach When working on data governance objectives, ensure that the goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This clarity will facilitate easier monitoring of progress and evaluation of the strategy’s effectiveness. 3. Identify Resources for Data Governance Selecting the right tools and personnel is crucial for data governance success. An IBM report shows companies with robust data governance and the right resources see a significant increase in revenue, highlighting the importance of having skilled individuals. To identify the necessary resources for a data governance strategy, a three-tiered data governance lead (DGL) is efficient. DGL ensures proper data use and aligns data rules with business goals across all departments. In a DGL, the: Steering Committee (SC) leads, Data Governance Office (DGO) coordinates, Representatives from each business area, including IT, come together as the Data Governance Working Group (DGWG). Here is how to identify the right resources for data governance strategy: Evaluate Skills Emphasize the recruitment of experienced personnel while highlighting the skills necessary for success, including effective communication, the ability to build consensus, and a deep understanding of governance industry practices. Set Performance Metrics Use necessary metrics to check the effectiveness of the chosen tools and the team’s performance. Evaluation helps identify areas of improvement and measure the success of your data governance strategy. 4. Implement Metadata Management Metadata management is a core step in building an effective data governance strategy. Metadata provides data with specific context, such as its format, source, creation date, and version. In simple terms, it adds meaning to the data. By implementing metadata management into the data governance strategy, you create a structured environment where data is not only secure and compliant but also readily accessible and usable for analytics and decision-making, Here’s how to approach this: Define Metadata Standards Create clear standards for metadata, including formats, naming conventions, and taxonomy, to ensure consistency across data assets. Audit Existing Metadata Conduct a comprehensive audit of existing metadata across the organization. This examination includes identifying all data sources, their associated metadata, and any gaps in metadata documentation. Implement A Repository Create a centralized metadata repository or a catalog that serves as the single source of truth for metadata across the company. The repository should be accessible to all stakeholders, supporting searchability and metadata management. 4. Establish Governance Framework A data governance framework serves as a blueprint for your data governance strategy, containing all the policies and procedures. For instance, policies may specify data retention periods and access controls, while procedures detail the monitoring and maintenance of data quality. Approach the governance framework in your data governance strategy by: Setting Goals Define what you want to achieve with your governance strategy. Also set a scope by identifying which data assets will be governed and the departments or business units involved. Creating Policies and Standards Develop clear data governance policies outlining roles, responsibilities, standards, and procedures. Policies should cover data quality, privacy, security, and usage. Establish data standards and metrics for measuring data quality, compliance, and the effectiveness of governance activities. Assigning Roles Define a governance structure that includes roles such as data stewards, data owners, and a data governance council or board. Assign specific responsibilities for data management and governance activities to individuals or teams. Implementing a Data Governance Strategy As mentioned before, putting your data governance strategy into practice involves following the roadmap, using the framework, and managing the governance programs. Start by following the roadmap, which tells you what steps to take and when. This approach helps keep the implementation focused and aligned with your primary business goals. Alongside, ensure the rules and responsibilities set out in your framework are followed daily. This adherence means having teams check that everything is running smoothly and making any necessary adjustments. By keeping on top of these tasks, your strategy will fit well with current operations and strengthen the overall management and use of data in your organization. Wrapping Up! To sum up, a good data governance strategy is the main step in creating a successful data governance program, and each governance strategy is unique, with its own set of goals and objectives. By keeping points like being clear when defining goals and opting for the right resources and tools, organizations can lay the groundwork for a reliable data governance strategy, enhancing efficiency and data-driven insights. LIKE.TG’s data governance solution enhances this process by offering a no-code, unified platform that simplifies data management, ensuring data integrity and enabling seamless sharing. Try out a free 14-days trial today for a comprehensive solution to all your data governance needs. Enhance Your Data Governance Strategy with LIKE.TG Don't wait to transform your data governance framework into a more manageable and effective system. Discover how LIKE.TG's no-code solution can empower your organization. Start you 14-days-trial now!

What Is Data Mining? Data mining, also known as Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD), is a powerful technique that analyzes and unlocks hidden insights from vast amounts of information and datasets. Data mining goes beyond simple analysis—leveraging extensive data processing and complex mathematical algorithms to detect underlying trends or calculate the probability of future events. What Are Data Mining Tools? Data mining tools are software that assist users in discovering patterns, trends, and relationships within vast amounts of data. They come in various forms, from simple to complex, catering to different needs. Type of Data Mining Tool Pros Cons Best for Simple Tools (e.g., Excel, Tableau) – User-friendly interface for beginners. – Data visualization and simple pattern recognition. – Quick and easy to learn. – Limited capabilities; suitable only for basic tasks. – Lack advanced algorithms and features. Simplifying data visualization and basic analysis. Advanced Tools (e.g., Python libraries, R) – Sophisticated algorithms for complex tasks. – Comprehensive machine learning capabilities. – Customizable and extensible. – Steeper learning curve; requires coding skills. – May overwhelm beginners. Enabling advanced analytics and custom model development. Domain-Specific Tools – Tailored for specific industries or domains. – Specialized features relevant to the industry. – Efficient for specific use cases. – Limited flexibility outside the targeted domain. – May not cover all data mining needs. Streamlining industry-specific data processing. Big Data Tools (e.g., Apache Spark, Hadoop) – Scalable for large datasets. – Distributed processing capabilities. – Handles parallel processing efficiently. – Complex setup and configuration. – Requires expertise in distributed computing. Simplifying distributed data processing. Text Mining Tools (e.g., NLTK, spaCy) – Extract insights from unstructured text. – Useful for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, etc. – Supports natural language processing. – Limited to text-based data. – May struggle with noisy or poorly formatted text. Simplifying text preprocessing and sentiment analysis. Web Mining Tools (e.g., Scrapy, Beautiful Soup) – Scrapes web content and analyzes weblogs. – Useful for competitive intelligence and content extraction. – Automates data collection from websites. – Requires knowledge of web scraping techniques. – May encounter legal and ethical issues. Simplifying web data extraction and content analysis. Why Are Data Mining Tools Important? Data mining allows businesses to analyze historical data, helping them predict future outcomes, identify risks, and optimize processes. Data mining tools help organizations solve problems, predict trends, mitigate risks, reduce costs, and discover new opportunities. Whether it’s choosing the right marketing strategy, pricing a product, or managing supply chains, data mining impacts businesses in various ways: Finance: Banks use predictive models to assess credit risk, detect fraudulent transactions, and optimize investment portfolios. These tools enhance financial stability and customer satisfaction. Healthcare: Medical researchers analyze patient data to discover disease patterns, predict outbreaks, and personalize treatment plans. Data mining tools aid early diagnosis, drug discovery, and patient management. Marketing: Marketers rely on customer segmentation, recommendation engines, and sentiment analysis. These tools enhance targeted advertising, customer retention, and campaign effectiveness. Customer Insights: Data mining tools enable users to analyze customer interactions, preferences, and feedback. This helps them understand customer behavior and pinpoint buying patterns, allowing them to tailor offerings, improve customer experiences, and build brand loyalty. Process Optimization: Data mining tools help identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and gaps in business processes. Whether it’s supply chain logistics, manufacturing, or service delivery, these tools optimize operations, reduce costs, and enhance productivity. Competitive Advantage: Data mining tools help businesses harness data effectively, revealing market trends, competitor strategies, and emerging opportunities. Top 8 Data Mining Tools 1. Apache Mahout Apache Mahout is a linear algebra framework that supports scalable machine learning and data mining. It offers several algorithms and tools tailored for developing machine learning models capable of processing large datasets. With its distributed architecture, Apache Mahout allows scalability over machine clusters. It also allows mathematicians and data scientists to create and execute custom algorithms for various machine-learning models. Key Features: Mathematically expressive Scala DSL Support for multiple distributed backends (including Apache Spark) Integration with Hadoop and Spark Scalability Algorithm support Pros: Can handle large datasets. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Supports a wide range of machine-learning algorithms. Integrates with platforms like Hadoop. Cons: There’s a high learning curve for using Apache Mahout. Best For: Implementing custom machine learning algorithms. 2. MonkeyLearn: MonkeyLearn is a machine-learning-based text analysis platform. It utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze and understand textual data. Therefore, it can help businesses extract insights from text-based sources such as social media posts, customer reviews, articles, and more. Key Features: Text Mining Specialization Custom Machine Learning Models No Code Integration Capabilities Pros: Easy to use and integrate with other platforms. Can handle large volumes of data. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Cons: Sometimes the segregation is generic based on the email content and needs more examples to learn. Financial category is not easily segregated/tagged. Challenging to have Monkey Learn bucket support tickets into distinct user-readable buckets based on ticket text. Best For: Businesses that need to process large volumes of data quickly and easily integrate their data mining models with other platforms. 3. Oracle Data Mining: Oracle Data Miner is an extension to Oracle SQL Developer for data scientists and analysts. It enables users to leverage Oracle databases for building, evaluating, and comparing machine learning models directly within the database environment. Oracle Data Miner provides access to advanced algorithms for data mining and machine learning. Users can integrate these algorithms into their SQL queries, allowing efficient model-building and evaluation processes within the familiar Oracle SQL Developer interface. Key Features: Interactive Workflow Tool Explore and Graph nodes for visualizing data Automated Model Building features Integration with RWorks with Big Data SQL Pros: Seamless integration with the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Can handle large volumes of data. Offers a graphical user interface for easy data mining. Multiple data mining algorithms and techniques are available. Cons: Requires more technical knowledge to use effectively. Microsoft Excel is required to decrypt data. Integration failures can occur due to complexity in the system across other platforms. Dependence on Oracle Database. Best For: Businesses that require a wide range of data mining algorithms and techniques and are working directly with data inside Oracle databases. 4. Sisense Sisense is a data analytics platform emphasizing flexibility in handling diverse data architectures. It offers the ability to connect with various data sources, which benefits businesses with complex data structures. The data mining platform offers features such as data preparation, exploration, and the creation of machine learning models, all aimed at optimizing performance and quality. Key Features: Ad-hoc Analysis Centralized Data Hub Data Connectors Scalable Data Handling Interactive Dashboards Pros: Easy to use and integrate with other platforms. Can handle large volumes of data. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Cons: Limited to certain types of models (e.g., classification, regression, and clustering). May not be suitable for businesses with complex data mining needs. Best For: Businesses that require a user-friendly interface for creating and deploying predictive models. 5. SAS Enterprise Miner SAS Enterprise Miner is a data mining tool offering offers various predictive modeling, data mining, and analytics capabilities. The data mining tool provides users access to various statistical, data mining, and machine learning algorithms. Key Features: Interactive GUI and batch processing Data preparation and exploration Model building and evaluation Multithreaded high-performance procedures Self-sufficiency for business users Pros: Easy to use and integrate with other platforms. Can handle large volumes of data. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Cons: Users expressed their dissatisfaction with the software’s interface. Several users have found the software difficult to learn. Best For: Businesses that need to process large volumes of data quickly and easily integrate their data mining models with other platforms. 6. Knime KNIME is an open-source analytics platform. It’s notable for its adaptable and modular design. It equips users with the capability to conduct extensive data transformations, explorations, and analyses, all facilitated by a user-friendly graphical interface. Knime’s modular structure allows for the straightforward assembly and personalization of data workflows. It also connects to an array of pre-designed nodes and components. Key Features: Drag-and-drop workflow creation Integration with R Open-source nature Customizable workflows Community support Pros: Easy to use and integrate with other platforms. Can handle large volumes of data. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Accessible and customizable due to its open-source nature. Cons: Some users have reported issues integrating Knime with specific platforms, such as Jupyter notebooks. Best For: Businesses that require robust data analytics capabilities without the complexity of more intricate data mining systems. 7. Orange Orange is an open-source tool for data mining, visualization, and analysis, crafted to support exploratory tasks and interactive visualizations. The tool comes equipped with an extensive array of visualization instruments and widgets, enabling the examination and analysis of various datasets. Key Features: Visual programming Machine learning widgets Customizable machine learning models Pre-trained classifiers and extractors No coding required Versatility Pros: Can handle large volumes of data. Offers fast model training and prediction times. Offers various machine learning algorithms. Integrates with platforms like Python. Cons: Manual Troubleshooting. Advance analysis is not so easy. Support isn’t always reliable. A high learning curve. Best For: Businesses that need to visually program custom machine learning models. 8. RapidMiner RapidMiner is an open-source platform widely recognized in the field of data science. It offers several tools that help in various stages of the data analysis process, including data mining, text mining, and predictive analytics. The data mining tool is designed to assist users in extracting insights from data. Key Features: Distributed Algebraic optimizer R-Like DSL Scala API linear algebra operations Text analysis and sentiment detection Pros: Easy to use and integrate with other platforms. No coding skills needed Easy to set up Dashboard is clean Offers fast model training and prediction times. Cons: Performance issues with large datasets Software stability Data output limitations Best For: Businesses that need to process large volumes of data quickly and easily integrate their data mining models with other platforms. How to Choose the Right Data Mining Tool Selecting the appropriate data mining tool can significantly influence the outcomes of data analysis efforts. To assist users in navigating this choice, the following guide outlines the essential considerations for choosing a data mining tool that aligns with their specific needs: 1. Understanding Data Requirements Before diving into the selection process, users must have a clear understanding of their data: Data Types: It’s imperative to ensure that the chosen tool is adept at handling the particular types of data users work with, be it structured or unstructured. Data Volume: The tool’s capacity to efficiently process the amount of data users plan to analyze should not be overlooked. 2. Define Your Requirements Clarifying requirements upfront can streamline the selection process: Analytical Needs: Users should pinpoint the types of analysis they aim to conduct, such as predictive modeling, clustering, or regression. User Expertise: The tool should correspond to the proficiency level of its users, catering to environments ranging from code-intensive for data scientists to graphical user interfaces for business analysts. 3. Evaluate Tool Capabilities A thorough evaluation of the tool’s capabilities is crucial: Functionality: Seek out tools that boast a comprehensive feature set in line with the analytical tasks users intend to perform. Performance: The tool’s capability to manage complex computations and sizable datasets is a key performance indicator. Scalability: The chosen tool should accomodate the growth of user data needs and remain relevant as their organization develops. 4. Integration and Compatibility The tool’s ability to integrate and coexist with existing systems is vital: Data Sources: Confirm that the tool offers support for the data sources that users employ. Software Ecosystem: The degree to which the tool integrates with other software in the user’s tech stack, such as databases, BI platforms, or cloud services, should be considered. 5. Support and Documentation The level of support and resources available can greatly affect user experience: Vendor Support: Opt for tools that are supported by dependable vendor assistance or a strong user community. Documentation and Training: Adequate learning materials and troubleshooting guides are essential for mastering the tool and resolving potential issues. 6. Trial and Testing Hands-on experience with the tool can provide valuable insights: Free Trials: Users are encouraged to utilize free trials or community editions to gauge the data mining tool’s capabilities firsthand. Weighing these factors can help users choose a data mining tool that satisfies their immediate requirements. It’s important to remember that the most suitable tool is the one that best harmonizes with the users’ data, objectives, and available resources. The Prerequisite to Data Mining: LIKE.TG Data mining requires meticulous data preparation and processing. This is whereLIKE.TG, a leading end-to-end data management platform, comes into play. LIKE.TG offers a comprehensive suite of features that swiftly prepares data for analysis. It empowers users to construct end-to-end data pipelines, leveraging sophisticated ETL features and a robust enterprise-grade integration engine. A key aspect of data preparation is the extraction of large datasets from a variety of data sources. LIKE.TG excels in this area, offering automated and bulk extraction from disparate sources, including unstructured sources, databases, data warehouses, cloud data providers, file systems, transfer protocols, web services, and various file formats. Transformation and conversion capabilities are another crucial component of data preparation. LIKE.TG provides users with advanced tools for reformatting data to meet specific analysis requirements or converting data from one format to another, ensuring both flexibility and efficiency. Data quality is a priority for LIKE.TG. It incorporates built-in features for data cleansing and scrubbing, and its rule-based data quality verification ensures the accuracy and integrity of data. Finally, LIKE.TG’s user-centric design simplifies complex tasks. Its intuitive drag-and-drop or single-click operations eliminate the need for extensive coding, significantly boosting productivity and efficiency in data mapping, validation, and cleansing tasks. In essence, LIKE.TG provides a comprehensive solution for making data analytics-ready, thereby facilitating efficient data mining. Key Features: AI-Driven Data Management: Streamlines unstructured data extraction, preparation, and data processing through AI and automated workflows. Enterprise-Grade Integration Engine: Offers comprehensive tools for integrating diverse data sources and native connectors for easy mapping. Interactive, Automated Data Preparation: Ensures data quality using data health monitors, interactive grids, and robust quality checks. Advanced Data Transformation: Offers a vast library of transformations for preparing analysis-ready data. Dynamic Process Orchestration: Automates data processing tasks, allowing for execution based on time-based schedules or event triggers. User-Centric Design: With its no-code, drag-and-drop interface, LIKE.TG makes data management accessible to users of all technical backgrounds. Seamless Integration: Integrating with a wide array of data sources, both on-premises and cloud-based, ensures a smooth data management experience. Comprehensive Data Handling: Offers a unified platform for all data-related tasks, from extraction to insights, backed by a vast library of data operations. How LIKE.TG Enables Robust Data Mining Workflows Data mining helps organizations extract valuable insights from their data. However, without automated data pipelines, it’s difficult for organizations to ensure the integrity and usefulness of data throughout the analysis process. LIKE.TG empowers organizations to create data pipelines with minimal effort, leveraging automation to streamline the data mining process. Data pipelines play a pivotal role in processing data from disparate sources. They seamlessly integrate data from various origins and transform it into a format that is ready for analysis. This transformation process, which includes data cleaning, normalization, aggregation, and conversion, ensures a consistent and unified view of data. Furthermore, data pipelines offer the advantage of real-time processing, providing up-to-date information that is crucial for prompt decision-making. Automated data pipelines also save time and resources by reducing manual errors in the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process. As organizations grow, their data grows correspondingly. Data pipelines, designed to scale, accommodate this growth, ensuring the data infrastructure keeps pace with organizational needs. Lastly, data pipelines prioritize maintaining high data quality. They ensure data consistency, identify and correct errors, and remove duplicates through built-in features for data cleansing, validation, and verification. Here’s how LIKE.TG achieves this: AI-Powered Document Extraction: LIKE.TG’s advanced AI technology enables users to capture data fields from unstructured files. Data Transformation and Conversion: Users can easily transform and prepare datasets for analysis using built-in transformations. Automated Rule-Based Data Quality: Users can ensure data extracted is accurately and reliably through rule-based verification and correction. No-Code Data Integration: Allows business users to manage complex data processes with minimal IT intervention, thanks to its no-code platform. Automation: With LIKE.TG, much of the data pipeline process is automated.Users can extract, transform, validate, and load data seamlessly, which significantly reduces manual effort and the potential for errors. Scalability: LIKE.TG’s solution is capable of handling growing data volumes and complexity without a drop in performance. Ready to transform your data mining processes with unparalleled efficiency and ease? Download your free 14-day trial and experience the power of seamless data integration or schedule a personalized demo to see LIKE.TG in action.

Data ingestion is important in collecting and transferring data from various sources to storage or processing systems. In this blog, we compare the best data ingestion tools available in the market in 2024. We will cover their features and pros and cons to help you select the best software for your use-case. What is Data Ingestion? Data ingestion is collecting and importing data from various sources into a database for further analysis, storage, or processing. This process can handle data in two primary modes: real-time processing, where data is ingested and processed immediately as it is generated. The other is batch processing, where data is collected at specific intervals and processed simultaneously. What are Data Ingestion Tools? Data ingestion tools are software and solutions designed to automate data transfer from various sources, like cloud storage, file systems, etc., to designated storage or analysis systems. These data ingestion tools streamline data gathering, reduce the need for manual intervention, and enable organizations to focus more on data analysis and insight generation. There are different types of data ingestion tools, each catering to the specific aspect of data handling. Standalone Data Ingestion Tools: These focus on efficiently capturing and delivering data to target systems like data lakes and data warehouses. They offer features like data capture, batch and real-time processing, and basic data transformation capabilities. While standalone data ingestion tools can fit data ingestion-specific use cases, organizations prefer solutions that are more flexible. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Tools: While ETL tools can handle the overall data integration process, they are also often used for data ingestion. Data Integration Platforms: Data integration platforms offer multiple data handling capabilities, including ingestion, integration, transformation, and management. Real-Time Data Streaming Tools: These tools ingest data continuously as it appears, making it available for immediate analysis. They are ideal for scenarios where timely data is critical, like financial trading or online services monitoring. Benefits of Data Ingestion Tools Data ingestion tools offer several benefits, including: Faster Data Delivery: Automating data ingestion with the help of tools speeds up processing, enabling more efficient scheduling. Improved Scalability: Automated data ingestion tools facilitate adding new data sources as the company grows and allow for real-time adjustments to data collection processes. Data Uniformity: Using data ingestion tools enables the extraction of information and converting it into a unified dataset. Organizations can use this information for business intelligence, reports, and analytics. Easier Skill Development: Data ingestion tools are designed with non-technical users in mind and often feature simplified interfaces that make learning and using them easier. How Do Data Ingestion Tools Work? Data ingestion tools help move data from various sources to where it can be stored and looked at. These tools utilize multiple protocols and APIs like HTTP/HTTPS, ODBC, JDBC, FTP/SFTP, AMQP, and WebSockets to efficiently connect with and transfer data from sources such as databases, cloud storage, files, and streaming platforms. First, these tools collect data from the sources using set commands or custom ones to find the data. Sometimes, data from different sources might be in different formats or structures. So, the data ingestion tools transform data to ensure consistency in format and structure. Then, these tools put this data into databases or data warehouses for analysis. Data ingestion tools also offer data movement directly into the destination system for situations where loading the data as quickly as possible is the priority. Why are Data Ingestion Tools Important? Data comes in many forms and from many places. A business might have data in cloud storage like Amazon S3, databases like MySQL, and coming in live from web apps. Transferring this data to necessary locations would be slow and difficult without data ingestion tools. Data ingestion solutions simplify and accelerate this process. They automatically capture incoming data, allowing businesses to quickly analyze their data and make timely decisions based on current events rather than outdated information. These tools are also flexible, as they can efficiently manage dynamic data sources, seamlessly incorporating data from new sources without requiring a complete system. This flexibility allows businesses to update and expand their data management strategies without disruption continuously. For example, if a company starts getting data from a new source, the tool can add that without starting from scratch. Top 8 Data Ingestion Tools in 2024 Various data ingestion tools in the market offer plenty of features and cater to specific business requirements. Below is a list of some of the best data ingestion solutions and their key features. LIKE.TG LIKE.TG is an enterprise-grade data platform that simplifies and streamlines data management. From data ingestion and validation to transformation and preparation to loading into a data warehouse, it accelerates time-to-insight by automating data movement. LIKE.TG’s suite of solutions caters to unstructured data extraction, data preparation, data integration, EDI and API management, data warehouse building, and data governance. With LIKE.TG’s no-code platform, ingest data from various sources into your data ecosystem without writing a single line of code. LIKE.TG offers native connectors to databases, file formats, data warehouses, data lakes, and other sources. You can easily access and ingest data from any source, regardless of format or location. LIKE.TG’s built-in transformations help to clean, enrich, and transform your data. From simple data cleansing to complex data transformations, LIKE.TG prepares your data for analysis and decision-making without technical expertise. LIKE.TG’s intuitive UI and unified design simplify data ingestion. Easily navigate the platform, design data pipelines, and quickly execute workflows. LIKE.TG’s parallel processing ETL engine enables you to handle large volumes of data efficiently. It provides optimal performance and scalability, allowing you to meet the growing data demands of your enterprise. LIKE.TG provides award-winning customer support and extensive training and documentation to help you maximize your data ingestion efforts. The platform offers the support and resources you need, from onboarding to troubleshooting. Keboola Keboola is an ETL platform designed for performing complex tasks. It provides custom options for data ingestion. Keboola facilitates a clear view and understanding of ETL setups. The platform accommodates various stores, such as Snowflake, Redshift, etc., and allows for SQL, Python, and R transformations. Pros Offers pre-built connectors to streamline data ingestion across multiple data sources and destinations. Users can write transformations in various languages and load or directly store the data within Keboola. Offers customized data sourcing for authentic analysis. Cons Modifying the schema or manipulating data can be complex with internal file-based storage. The cross-branch change review sometimes fails to detect the changes. Users must manually set up the webhooks or API triggers to import event data. Airbyte Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform. It allows businesses to build ELT data pipelines. It enables data engineers to establish log-based incremental replication. Pros The Connector Development Kit (CDK) allows for creating or modifying connectors in almost any programming language. Replicates a decent volume of data using change data capture (CDC) and SSH tunnels. Users can use straight SQL or DBT to transform the data. Cons Scheduler sometimes interrupts jobs unexpectedly. Regular updates require users to install new versions often. Predicting usage and controlling costs become difficult as data volumes grow. Matillion Matillion ETL is a data ingestion tool allowing users to create pipelines using a no-code/low-code, drag-and-drop web interface. Pros Its primary focus is on batch data processing, which is optimized for the transformation and loading phase of the ETL process within the cloud data warehouses. It replicates SQL tables using change data capture (CDC) by design. Matillion’s cloud-native transform engine scales to manage large datasets. Cons It sometimes struggles to scale hardware infrastructure, particularly EC2 instances, for more resource-intensive transformations. Users often complain about outdated documentation with new version releases. Matillion struggles with collaboration. Teams larger than five face challenges working together on the same data ingestion workflows. Talend Talend is a low-code platform that collects data from different sources and transforms it for insights. The tool integrates data ingestion, transformation, and mapping with automated quality checks. Pros It offers pre-built components for data ingestion from different sources. Users can design or reuse data pipelines in the cloud. It offers low-code and automated data replication. Cons Talend’s software is complex, requiring learning time before using it confidently, even for simple data ingestion pipelines. Documentation for features is often incomplete. Version upgrades, capacity changes, and other common configuration tasks are not automated. Hevo Data Hevo Data is a no-code, cloud-based ETL platform designed for business users without coding skills, simplifying the data ingestion. Pros The API allows easy integration of Hevo into the data workflow and enables performing pipeline actions without accessing the dashboard. It offers end-to-encryption and security options. The no-code data ingestion pipelines use a graphical UI to simplify creating ingestion workflows. Cons It limits data integration into BI tools or exporting data to files through integration workflows. It does not offer customization of components or logic. Also, the user cannot write code on his own. It offers very limited data extraction sources. Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed platform suitable for real-time data ingestion. Pros It supports low latency for real-time data streaming. It can adjust storage and processing to handle petabytes of data. The platform ensures data persistence across distributed and durable clusters. Cons It is a complex software that requires a steep learning curve to understand its architecture. Users face challenges while working on small data sources. Kafka’s replication and storage mechanisms require significant hardware resources. Amazon Kinesis Amazon Kinesis is a cloud-hosted data service that extracts, processes, and analyzes your data streams in real-time. This solution captures, stores, and processes data streams and videos. Pros It offers low latency, meaning analytics applications can access streaming data within 70 milliseconds after collection. The Kinesis app integrates with many other AWS services, allowing users to build complete applications. It automatically provisions and scales resources in on-demand mode. Cons It is not a suitable tool for on-premise data ingestion or multi-cloud, as it is integrated within the AWS ecosystem. Users must utilize separate services to analyze or store data, as it only focuses on data migration. It does not offer clear documentation, which is often confusing to the consumers. How to Choose the Right Data Ingestion Platform? Opting for the right data ingestion tool directly impacts the data management strategy of an organization. Various factors should be considered while choosing the data ingestion platform. Data Sources and Formats Businesses should consider if the tool supports connectivity with all relevant data sources, including databases, cloud services, APIs, and streaming platforms. Also, they need to verify if the tool can handle various data formats, such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, to meet their specific data ingestion requirements. Scalability and Performance The scalability of the data ingestion tool is key for handling increasing data volumes without sacrificing performance. Businesses should look for features like parallel processing and distributed architectures. These can handle large datasets effectively, ensuring data is processed smoothly and quickly as the company expands. Data Transformation Capabilities It is important to evaluate the tool’s data transformation features, including data cleaning, enrichment, aggregation, and normalization capabilities. Businesses should consider the tools to perform these transformations before ingesting the data into their storage or processing systems to maintain data quality and consistency. Ease of Use and Deployment Businesses should opt for a tool that offers a user-friendly interface and intuitive workflows to minimize the learning curve for their team members. Additionally, they need to choose a tool with flexible deployment options, such as cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid deployments, to suit their business requirements and preferences. Integration and Interoperability The right data ingestion tool seamlessly integrates with existing data infrastructure and tools. Businesses should look for pre-built connectors and APIs that facilitate integration with databases, data warehouses, BI tools, and other systems in their data ecosystem. This practice enables smooth data flows and leverages existing investments effectively. Cost and ROI Businesses should evaluate the data ingestion tool’s total cost of ownership (TCO), including licensing fees, implementation costs, and ongoing maintenance expenses. They need to consider the tool’s pricing model and calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) based on improved efficiency, faster time to insights, and better decision-making enabled by the tool. Concluding Thoughts Data ingestion tools play an essential role in data integration tasks by streamlining the transfer of large datasets. They help you set up a strong ingestion pipeline for managing data, saving time and effort. Utilizing a top data ingestion tool is a fundamental step in the data analytics process. These tools also enable you to monitor and improve data quality, maintaining compliance with privacy and security standards. If you are seeking a comprehensive data ingestion tool, LIKE.TG is the right choice. LIKE.TG’s no-code, modern data integration solution can simplify and automate the process of ingesting data from multiple sources. Schedule a demo or download a free trial of LIKE.TG to experience effortless data ingestion. Don’t wait; quickly simplify your data management to drive better business outcomes. Start Streamlining Your Data Management Today Schedule a demo with LIKE.TG today and see for yourself how straightforward and efficient data ingestion can be. If you're ready to experience the benefits first-hand, try LIKE.TG for free and start transforming your data workflow without any delays. Request a Demo

One of the key processes in healthcare data management is integrating data from many patient information sources into a centralized repository. This data comes from various sources, ranging from electronic health records (EHRs) and diagnostic reports to patient feedback and insurance details. Also, the volume of healthcare data is rising with every passing day, making healthcare data governance increasingly complex and, at the same time, essential for ensuring patient privacy, data accuracy, and regulatory compliance. According to RBC, the digital universe of healthcare data is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 36% by 2025. In response to this growing complexity and volume, LIKE.TG offers a comprehensive solution to seamlessly integrate diverse healthcare data sources and govern data assets, ensuring that all patient information is unified and accessible. Healthcare Data Governance Data governance in healthcare is a multifaceted approach that encompasses the establishment of policies and standards to ensure the effective management, security, and integrity of patient data. The delineation of roles and responsibilities for data stewardship, where individuals are entrusted with overseeing the lifecycle of data from collection to disposal, is an important component of healthcare data governance. In parallel, data governance initiatives entail the deployment of advanced technologies to enhance patient data protection and access control mechanisms. Encryption, access controls, and robust authentication protocols are among the tools utilized to safeguard sensitive patient information from unauthorized access and cyber threats. With a data governance framework, healthcare organizations can harness the full potential of their data as a strategic asset, improving not just the bottom line but also patient care and clinical outcomes. Integrating Disparate Healthcare Data Data management is crucial for improving patient care and efficiency within the healthcare system. Healthcare providers often deal with data from various sources, such as EHRs, lab reports, imaging systems, and wearable health devices. However, a solution-focused approach can simplify the integration process and offer significant benefits. Breaking down data silos is necessary to obtain a unified view of patient data. By integrating information from different sources, healthcare professionals can gain a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s health and improve the quality of care they provide. For instance, integrating real-time data from wearable devices with EHRs enables healthcare professionals to make timely interventions and tailor care plans according to individual needs. Once the data is integrated, governance can further facilitate healthcare providers. By enhancing data discovery, hospitals can easily search and retrieve patients’ information. It ensures that data across all platforms is consistent, accurate, and easily accessible. Additionally, data governance enables healthcare providers to make more informed decisions, which can lead to better patient outcomes. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, effective healthcare data integration and use of big data could generate up to $100 billion annually across the US healthcare system, highlighting the potential benefits of enhancing data integration and governance. Healthcare Data Governance with LIKE.TG Integrating diverse healthcare data into a unified system is only the first step towards transforming healthcare operations. The real utilitylies in using the combined data effectively, made easier by LIKE.TG‘s advanced data governance features for organizing and finding data. Data Cataloging for Data Retrieval LIKE.TG‘s data governance solution comes with a data cataloging function that acts like a search engine for healthcare data, offering advanced search and filtering capabilities. This functionality allows healthcare professionals to quickly locate specific data sets or patient information. For example, a doctor looking for a patient’s history with conditions can quickly retrieve all relevant records without sifting through multiple systems or databases. Data Management through Data Tagging Additionally, LIKE.TG’s data tagging feature enhances how healthcare professionals manage and access data. By allowing users to tag data assets with specific labels, it simplifies organizing and finding data based on criteria such as disease type, patient demographics, or treatment outcomes. For example, if a healthcare provider tags patient records with “diabetes” and “2024 check-ups,” any team member searching for recent diabetes cases can quickly retrieve all relevant patient files without navigating through extensive databases. Streamlined Workflows The synergy between data integration and data governance through LIKE.TG streamlines workflows and enhances decision-making capabilities. Healthcare professionals can access a comprehensive view of patient data, enabling more accurate diagnoses, personalized treatment plans, and predictive health insights. This integrated approach to data management and discovery boosts overall healthcare operational efficiency. With more accessible and systematically organized data, healthcare organizations can eliminate unnecessary administrative tasks and improve resource allocation. Practical Application of LIKE.TG for Healthcare Transformation Let’s say, Bright Future Clinic recently adopts LIKE.TG’s data management solution to tackle the challenge of efficiently managing chronic disease patients, focusing specifically on heart disease management. LIKE.TG facilitates data governance but also seamlessly integrates with existing systems and workflows. By integrating diverse healthcare data into a unified system, the clinic aims to streamline operations and improve patient care. The clinic uses the data cataloging function as a search engine, enabling healthcare professionals to instantly find specific datasets or patient details. For instance, when a patient with a history of heart disease visits, a doctor quickly accesses their complete medical records, including previous EHRs, lab results, and medication history, without the need to sift through multiple systems. Additionally, by implementing data tagging, the clinic organizes patient records and relevant health data with tags such as “heart disease,” “2024 consultations,” or “medication adherence.” This approach simplifies the organization and retrieval of data based on specific criteria, enhancing the ability to provide personalized and timely care. The integration of LIKE.TG’s solution streamlines the clinic’s workflows, significantly improves decision-making, allowing healthcare providers to focus more on patient care and less on administrative tasks. Advantages of LIKE.TG’s Integrated Approach LIKE.TG’s integrated approach to healthcare data governance and management streamlines the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition to analysis, ensuring data remains an important asset for enhancing patient care and operational efficiency. Improved Data Consistency LIKE.TG’s data integration and governance solutions standardize the handling of patient data, ensuring every department works with the same, accurate information. Enhanced Data Security With LIKE.TG, healthcare providers can enforce strict data security measures. Role-based access ensures that only authorized personnel can view sensitive patient information, reducing the risk of data breaches. Easier Data Discovery LIKE.TG’s data cataloging feature simplifies the search for patient information into a straightforward task. Healthcare professionals can quickly find specific patient records, treatment histories, or medication details using advanced search and filtering, thereby speeding up the care process. Reduced Operational Costs By automating data integration and improving data discovery, LIKE.TG helps healthcare providers operate more efficiently, cutting down on unnecessary tests and administrative overhead. Improve Healthcare Data Governance and Integration with LIKE.TG Through seamless integration and data cataloging, healthcare professionals can access a comprehensive view of patient information, driving more informed decisions and personalized care. Whether it’s improving data consistency, enhancing security, facilitating easy discovery, or reducing operational costs, LIKE.TG provides the tools needed to achieve excellence in healthcare data governance. LIKE.TG’s data integration and governance solutions offer a transformative approach to handling healthcare data. By unifying data from diverse sources and ensuring its easy discovery and use, healthcare providers can significantly improve patient care, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure data security. Optimize healthcare data governance and management with LIKE.TG. Experience the difference with a 14-day free trial and discover how LIKE.TG can transform your data into one of your most valuable assets for patient care and operational success. Manage Your Healthcare Data with LIKE.TG Looking to simplify the complex process of data integration and governance in healthcare? Try LIKE.TG for free for 14 days and optimize your workflow. Start a Free Trial

As data variety and volumes grow, extracting insights from data has become increasingly formidable. To put it into perspective, a bibliometrics study reveals that an astounding 2.5 million new papers are published annually. Processing this information is beyond traditional data processing tools. Automated data aggregation tools offer a spectrum of capabilities that can overcome these challenges. They gather, process, and analyze data from diverse sources. From handling modest data processing tasks to managing large and complex datasets, these tools bolster an organization’s data infrastructure. This blog reviews the top 7 data aggregation tools, exploring how each solution ensures that every byte of an organization’s data is harnessed for strategic insights. What are Data Aggregation Tools? Data aggregation tools are solutions designed to collect data from multiple sources, process it, and present it in a summarized format. These tools are essential for consolidating diverse data sets into a coherent whole, enabling organizations to analyze and derive insights from combined data. They typically include functionalities for extracting data from various databases, transforming it to align with business needs, and loading it into a central repository for easy access and analysis. Why Are Data Aggregation Tools Important? Data aggregation tools allow businesses to harness the power of their collective data, often siloed across different systems and formats. By aggregating data, these tools provide a unified view crucial for informed decision-making, trend analysis, and strategic planning. They also save time and resources by automating the data collection and transformation processes, reducing the likelihood of errors and ensuring data integrity. Who Uses Data Aggregation Tools? Business analysts, data scientists, IT professionals, and decision-makers across various industries rely on data aggregation tools to gather and analyze data. They are particularly valuable in finance, healthcare, marketing, and retail sectors, where data is a critical asset for understanding market trends, customer behavior, and operational efficiency. Essentially, any organization aiming to leverage data for competitive advantage will benefit from data aggregation tools. Example Scenario: Data Aggregation Tools in Action This example demonstrates how data aggregation tools facilitate consolidating financial data from multiple sources into actionable financial insights. Scenario:A multinational corporation has branches worldwide, each operating with its financial systems and maintaining separate ledgers, expense records, and revenue reports. The corporation’s CFO needs to prepare a consolidated financial statement for the annual report. However, the financial data is fragmented across different systems, currencies, and regulatory standards, making it challenging to compile a comprehensive statement. Application of Data Aggregation Tool: Extraction:The tool extracts financial data from each branch’s ledgers, expense records, and revenue reports. Transformation:It converts various currencies into a single reporting currency and aligns disparate financial practices to the company’s standardized accounting principles. Loading:The transformed data is loaded into a central financial system. Aggregation:The tool aggregates the data to summarize total expenses, revenues, and financial performance metrics across all branches. Analysis:With the aggregated data, the CFO can analyze financial health, identify cost-saving opportunities, and assess the performance of each branch. Outcome:The CFO successfully creates a unified financial statement that accurately reflects the corporation’s global financial status, enabling stakeholders to make informed investment decisions and strategic plans. The 7 Best Data Aggregation Tools for Business LIKE.TG LIKE.TG is a data aggregation tool that combines a user-friendly interface with robust technical features. It caters to business and technical users without requiring extensive IT skills. At its core, LIKE.TG boasts a potent ETL engine that automates data integration. Additionally, the platform’s customizable automation enhances efficiency by scheduling tasks and providing real-time monitoring to address integration errors quickly. These features streamline data integration, ensuring users enjoy uninterrupted data flow. Likewise, LIKE.TG’s adaptability shines in handling diverse data sources. The platform leverages a high-performing ETL engine for efficient data movement and transformation, including mapping, cleansing, and enrichment. Key Features: AI-Driven Data Management: Streamlines data extraction, preparation, and data processing through AI and automated workflows. Enterprise-Grade Integration Engine: Offers comprehensive tools for integrating diverse data sources and native connectors for easy mapping. Interactive, Automated Data Preparation: Ensures data quality using data health monitors, interactive grids, and robust quality checks. Advanced Data Transformation: Offers a vast library of transformations for preparing analysis-ready data. Dynamic Process Orchestration: Automates data aggregation tasks, allowing for execution based on time-based schedules or event triggers. User-Centric Design: With its no-code, drag-and-drop interface, LIKE.TG democratizes data management, making it accessible to users of all technical backgrounds. Seamless Integration: Integrating with a wide array of data sources, both on-premises and cloud-based, ensures a smooth data management experience. Comprehensive Data Handling: From extraction to insights, LIKE.TG offers a unified platform for all data-related tasks backed by a vast library of data operations. Best for: Businesses looking for an end-to-end data management solution from extraction to data integration, data warehousing, and even API management. Alteryx Alteryxis a data analytics platform offering a suite of data aggregation tools. Its open-data engineering environment streamlines data preparation tasks, enabling users to aggregate data and share results without coding expertise. Alteryx’s drag-and-drop interface and deployment options allow collaboration and sharing among team members. Alteryx’s data preparation, blending, and cleansing features provide a solution for processing large data volumes. Key Features: Data collection Data processing and presentation Integration with various sources User-friendly interface Multi-server support, backup and recovery, and maintainability. Pros: User-friendly interface for data preparation and analysis Wide range of data sources and connectors Flexible and customizable reporting and visualization options Scalable for large datasets Offers a variety of pre-built templates and tools for data analysis Cons: Some users have reported that Alteryx’s customer support is lacking. The documentation and assistance videos can be unclear and overly technical. Integrating this platform for white-label/embedded use cases can be challenging. Best for: Data analysts and businesses needing a robust data aggregation tool. IBM Cloud Pak for Data IBM Cloud Pak for Datais an integrated data and AI platform that aids in removing data silos and improving data security and accessibility. It offers a modular set of software components for data management. The tool has features such as data fabric and AI lifecycle management, governance, security, integration, observability, and master data management. Key Features: Cloud-Native Solution Unified Interface Data Fabric Architecture Built on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform Pros: Modular software components for streamlined data analysis and management. Seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift container platform Data virtualization layer for consolidating distributed data sources Supports a wide range of IBM and third-party services spanning the entire data lifecycle Cons: Some users have reported that it can be difficult to scale due to the need to purchase additional licenses or upgrade to a higher-tier plan. While IBM Cloud Pak for Data is touted as a low-code platform, considerable coding is still required for expression languages, advanced application programming interfaces, and webhooks. Complex setup and configuration Steep learning curve for some features Best for: Businesses seeking to enhance productivity and simplify data management complexities. Stata Statais a statistical software that offers data management and statistical analysis capabilities. It has a collapsecommand feature. This feature enables users to group data and compute summary statistics like mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. The command also allows the creation of new variables derived from existing ones. Stata’s interface and extensive documentation further enhance its accessibility to novices in statistical software. Key Features: Broad Suite of Statistical Features Publication-Quality Graphics Automated Reporting Python Integration (PyStata) Community-Contributed Features Pros: Wide range of statistical analysis and modeling capabilities User-friendly interface for data manipulation and analysis Supports a wide range of data formats and sources Offers a variety of pre-built templates and tools for data analysis Cons: Some users report that the Stata interface is not intuitive. Limited visualization capabilities compared to other data aggregation tools Limited collaboration features Steep learning curve for some advanced features Best for: Researchers and data analysts across diverse sectors. Google Looker Google Lookeris a cloud-based business intelligence platform designed to support businesses in collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from various sources. Its data modeling layer helps users integrate data from disparate databases, CRMs, and systems into a single view. Looker’s calculated fields and aggregate awareness features optimize query performance and facilitate the extraction of insights from large datasets. Key Features: Aggregate awareness Integrated data exploration GUI with visual profiling and insight tools. Pros: User-friendly interface for data exploration and analysis Seamless integration with Google Cloud Platform Offers a wide range of data visualization options Supports a wide range of data sources and connectors Cons: Large dashboards have a slow loading time. No SQL CLI. Not enough high-resolution dashboards. Needs better user management.IAM, SSO, etc., are for the embedded use case. Limited scalability for large datasets Steep learning curve for beginners Best for: Businesses analyzing extensive data volumes seeking query efficiency. Zoho Analytics Zoho Analyticsoffers a platform for data analytics and aggregation. The platform is complete with dashboards and reports that support decision-making. Zoho’s aggregate formulas enable insight generation from summary statistics, while its data blending capabilities ensure a single view from multiple sources. Zoho Analytics supports various data import formats and provides pivot tables for summarizing data across multiple dimensions. Its APIs help with data integration and customization, enabling streamlined reporting. Key Features: Data preparation with ZOHO DataPrep Quick visual creation Filter and user filter Simple drag-and-drop dashboard Pros: Extensive APIs for seamless data integration and dynamic report embedding. User-friendly interface for data preparation and analysis Wide range of data sources and connectors Flexible and customizable reporting and visualization options Supports real-time data integration and analysis Offers a variety of pre-built templates and tools for data analysis Cons: Limited customization options for more advanced users, such as creating custom formulas or customizing the look and feel of reports and dashboards. Does not currently support connecting to all data sources, such as NoSQL databases or unstructured data sources. Difficult to scale due to the need to purchase additional licenses or upgrade to a higher-tier plan. Limited data source integration compared to other data aggregation tools Limited customization options for dashboards and reports Best for: Companies seeking a flexible and intuitive data analytics tool. Integrate.io Integrate.iois a cloud-based data integration platform streamlining, connecting, and aggregating data from diverse sources. The platform has several pre-built connectors for cloud services and on-premises applications. It is also complemented by a no-code interface that helps users to create custom connectors. Key Features: Easy In-Pipeline Data Transformations Simple Workflow Creation to Define Dependencies Between Tasks Salesforce to Salesforce Integrations Supports connectivity to over 200 e-commerce-related data stores Data Transformation Tools Pros: User-friendly interface for data integration and transformation Supports a wide range of data sources and connectors Offers a variety of pre-built templates and tools for data integration Highly customizable and extensible Cons: The drag-and-drop interface becomes extremely tough to use for complicated pipelines. Deployment of pipelines can be quite confusing. Error logs are not always detailed. Transforming JSON or other nested data is not easy. Best for: Scenarios that involve Salesforce Integration, File Data Preparation, REST API Ingestion, and Database Replication. How to Choose a Data Aggregation Tool Choosing the right data integration tool is crucial for effective data management and analysis. A data aggregation tool must meet an organization’s needs and be flexible enough to adapt to future changes. It should be able to handle the growing volume and variety of data and provide the functionality users need to transform and analyze data effectively. Identify Data Sources List all potential data sourcessuch as databases, cloud storage, and third-party APIs. Verify compatibilitywith the data aggregation tool for each source. Test connectionsto ensure reliable data retrieval. Assess Connectivity Evaluate the tool’s abilityto connect with listed data sources. Check for pre-built connectorsor APIs that facilitate easy integration. Ensure support for real-time data accessif needed for operations. Evaluate Scalability Understand the tool’s architectureand how it handles large data sets. Conduct stress teststo see how the tool performs under heavy data loads. Review the provider’s roadmapfor future scalability improvements. Consider Speed and Efficiency Benchmark processing timesfor typical data aggregation tasks. Compare performanceagainst other tools. Look for featuresthat optimize performance, like in-memory processing. Check for Data Transformation Features: Identify the types of data transformations required, such as filtering, sorting, or merging. Test the tool’s transformation capabilitieswith data samples. Ensure the tool can handle complex transformationswithout significant performance impact. Ensure Data Governance Check for compliancewith relevant data protection regulations. Assess the tool’s data quality managementfeatures. Verify that the tool provides audit trailsand version control. Look for Customization and Flexibility Determine if the tool allows for customizationto fit specific needs. Test the tool’s flexibilityby simulating changes in data processes. Ensure the tool can adaptto future changes in data strategy. User-Friendly Interface Evaluate the UI/UXof the tool through a hands-on trial. Gather feedbackfrom potential users within the organization. Check for the availability of training resourcesor certifications. Support and Documentation Research the level of supportoffered, including availability and response times. Review the documentationfor comprehensiveness and clarity. Look for an active user communityor forums for additional support. Essential Features for Choosing a Data Aggregation Tool Not all data aggregation tools are created equal. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the essential features and capabilities that any robust data aggregation tool should offer: Flexible Grouping Options The ability to aggregate data by grouping it based on specified column(s) is fundamental. Look for data aggregation tools that allow for flexible grouping options, including single or multiple columns, date ranges, or custom criteria. This flexibility ensures you can tailor the aggregation process to suit your data requirements. Comprehensive Summarization Methods A reliable data aggregation tool should support various summarization methods to derive meaningful insights. These methods may include: Count: Determine the total number of occurrences or records within each group. Sum: Calculate the total sum of numerical values within each group. Average: Compute the mean or average value of numeric data within each group. Minimum and Maximum: Identify the smallest and largest values within each group. Variance and Standard Deviation: Measure the dispersion or spread of data around the mean. Ensure the data aggregation tool offers these standard summarization methods and the flexibility to create custom aggregations as needed. Data Cleansing and Transformation Look for built-in capabilities to cleanse and transform raw data before aggregation. This includes handling missing values, removing duplicates, standardizing formats, and converting data types. Robust data cleansing ensures the accuracy and reliability of aggregated results. Scalability and Performance Evaluate the data aggregation tool’s scalability and performance capabilities, especially when dealing with large datasets. It should efficiently handle increasing volumes of data without compromising speed or accuracy. Consider factors such as parallel processing, optimized algorithms, and support for distributed computing frameworks. Data Source Compatibility Ensure compatibility with various data sources, including databases, cloud storage platforms, APIs, and file formats. The data aggregation tool should seamlessly integrate with your existing data infrastructure and support real-time or batch data ingestion. Customization and Extensibility Seek data aggregation tools that offer customization options and extensibility features to adapt to evolving business needs. This may include custom functions, scripting capabilities, and integration with external libraries or frameworks for advanced analytics and visualization. Security and Compliance Prioritize data security and compliance requirements when selecting a data aggregation tool. Look for features such as role-based access control, encryption, audit trails, and compliance certifications (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) to ensure the protection and privacy of sensitive data. User-Friendly Interface and Accessibility A user-friendly interface with intuitive navigation and visualization capabilities enhances user adoption and productivity. Additionally, consider accessibility features such as cloud-based deployment, cross-platform compatibility, and mobile support for seamless access to aggregated data from anywhere, anytime. Take the Next Step with LIKE.TG Data aggregation tools offer various features tailored to meet the evolving needs of businesses of all sizes. From simplifying complex data landscapes to empowering decision-makers with actionable insights, these tools are indispensable in harnessing the true potential of data. LIKE.TG’s combination of user-friendliness, powerful AI capabilities, extensive connectivity, focus on data quality, and customization options make it a standout choice for organizations looking to streamline data aggregation. Explore the power of LIKE.TG first-hand. 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A 2021 Educase report shows that 75% of surveyed institutions have started or are planning extensive digital transformation strategies to improve their data utilization. The importance of a strategic approach to data utilization in this context cannot be overstated. Effective data management frameworks ensure that data across the institution is accurate, consistent, and used in alignment with internal policies and external regulations. These frameworks support a data-informed culture where decisions are based on reliable evidence rather than intuition or assumption. Unified Data for Strategic Curriculum Development Integrating data in higher education institutions is essential for making strategic decisions that impact curriculum planning. By processing information from diverse data sources, universities can gain a holistic view that informs targeted, effective strategies. This approach also allows educational institutions to pinpoint areas where curriculum may be lacking or where there’s an opportunity to introduce new, relevant courses that align with emerging industry trends. For example, suppose data reveals a growing interest among students in sustainable technologies, coupled with a rise in job market demand in this sector. In that case, a university can decide to develop new courses or even degree programs focused on sustainability. Curriculum planning benefits from a unified data perspective by giving decision-makers a complete picture of the academic scenario. This complete view empowers them to make informed choices that enhance student learning experiences, which may increase graduation rates and improve employability upon graduation. Integrating data from scattered sources into a coherent view needs data management tools and the expertise to interpret complex datasets. University Data Management and Governance with LIKE.TG The right data management tool is essential for unified data. LIKE.TG’s data transformation capabilities and comprehensive business glossary help achieve a unified view of university data. It streamlines data processing and increases efficiency across departments. LIKE.TG’s no-code UI transforms university data management and governance by allowing higher education institutions to manage and analyze vast amounts of data without coding easily. This user-friendly interface streamlines complex data processes such as extraction, integration, and migration. Segmentation Simplification of Data LIKE.TG’s no-code approach allows universities to segment and analyze student data visually. Using drag-and-drop features, administrators can easily categorize students by academic performance or enrollment status, making it easy to tailor curricula to meet diverse student needs through the interface, improving educational offerings without any programming. Universities can also use LIKE.TG to aggregate and review data at different levels, such as departments or programs, without writing a single line of code. They can visualize key metrics like course enrollments, average grades, and retention rates. With these insights, institutions can quickly identify trends, evaluate program success, and make informed decisions to improve and update their curricula continuously. Business Glossary for Data Governance Effective data governance in higher education ensures that important information is easily accessible to stakeholders like faculty, administrators, and students, promoting collaboration and informed decision-making. However, using different terminologies across departments can cause stakeholder confusion and misinterpretation. For example, in the academic department, “student success” typically refers to achieving high grades, completing courses on time, and making satisfactory progress toward degree completion. In contrast, student services departments view “student success” more broadly. They may include factors such as student engagement, satisfaction with support services, and overall well-being in their interpretation of success. In this case, the lack of standardization for “student success” can lead to confusion and misalignment. LIKE.TG’s business glossary helps universities establish a common language for data. It defines key terms and metrics, enabling consistent and accurate interpretation of data across departments. A unified definition of “student success” across academic and administrative departments can lead to more targeted support programs and metrics for evaluating their effectiveness. Improved Data Access with Tags LIKE.TG incorporates tags alongside the business glossary. Tags improve categorization and make data retrieval easier and more accessible. Tags like “academic performance” can categorize terms related to academic metrics such as GPA, course completion, rates, and academic standings. Users can quickly find relevant information without sifting through vast databases using tagged data related to specific programs, student demographics, or research projects. The Benefits of Adopting LIKE.TG for Higher Education Institutions Unified Data Management LIKE.TG provides a central hub for all data assets, streamlining data integration from diverse sources into one accessible repository. This centralization enhances the reliability and accessibility of data across the university. Universities can merge data from online learning platforms, library usage statistics, and campus engagement activities into a unified dashboard, enabling academic advisors to craft personalized student success strategies. No-Code Simplicity Users from non-technical backgrounds can leverage LIKE.TG’s no-code interface to manage data effectively, democratizing data access and analysis within the institution. With this feature, universities can speed up enrollment by generating data reports on student enrollment trends without IT expertise. Data Quality and Profiling LIKE.TG ensures that the data used for decision-making is of the highest quality. Its data profiling capabilities identify and correct inconsistencies. Academic institutions can rely on this data to make decisions like learning programs and research initiatives. Educational institutions can automatically clean and standardize incoming student application data, giving the admissions team works with the most accurate and up-to-date information. Automation and Efficiency Automation streamlines administrative tasks and data management for higher education institutions so they can focus on enhancing student learning experiences and operational innovations. Higher education institutions can automate the data integration process for new research grants, reducing manual data entry hours and allowing researchers to focus more on their projects. Transforming University Data Management with LIKE.TG Comprehensive student data analysis optimizes the process of curriculum development. Let’s say a higher education institution identifies the need to leverage its vast student performance and feedback data. The objective is to tailor the curriculum to student needs and industry trends, ensuring they’re well-prepared for the job market after graduation. LIKE.TG’s Solution for Higher Education Institution In the initial phase, LIKE.TG facilitates the integration of varied student data sources. This process involves: Data Extraction LIKE.TG’s AI-recommended template extraction streamlines data extraction. Its native database connectivity and API integration allow pulling data from institutional and external sources. This whole process drastically reduces the preparation time by automating tasks such as name and record parsing. Through this, universities can extract data from multiple sources, including academic records, course evaluations, and alums employment reports. Data Transformation The university combines these diverse data streams into a unified dataset through transformations, such as Joins. Expressions are applied to clean and standardize individual data entries, ensuring consistency across all records. Data Loading The transformed data is moved to a centralized repository for further analysis. Using unified data allows universities to comprehensively view student academic performance, engagement levels, and post-graduation success. Standardizing Data with LIKE.TG’s Business Glossary Terminology Standardization LIKE.TG’s business glossary allows for defining and standardizing key educational metrics and terms across departments. This common language eliminates ambiguity and facilitates a shared understanding of data insights. Data Consistency Establishing clear definitions for terms like “Student Engagement” and “Employment Readiness” allows universities to ensure that data analysis and curriculum decisions are based on consistent criteria across all academic units. Data Enrichment LIKE.TG’s business glossary enriches data assets by attaching relevant metadata. This metadata provides additional context and clarification about the purpose and usage of each data asset, further enhancing the common understanding among stakeholders. Specific Outcomes Achieved By Leveraging LIKE.TG’s integrated solutions, universities can: Identify Curriculum Gaps Analyze student feedback and performance data to pinpoint areas where the curriculum needs enhancement or innovation – aligning the curriculum more closely with current industry requirements and future employment opportunities. Improve Student Outcomes Adjusting teaching methods and course content based on data-driven insights leads to higher student satisfaction, better academic performance, and increased post-graduation employment rates. Final Words Higher education institutions can navigate the complexities of modern academia by integrating and standardizing their vast datasets. It ensures that their strategies are both informed and impactful. With LIKE.TG, universities can seamlessly blend diverse data sources and establish a unified data language across departments. This harmonization enables strategic decisions—from curriculum development to faculty hiring— grounded in reliable, accessible, and consistent data. Experience advanced data management and governance with LIKE.TG’s user-friendly solution. Process the data to drive strategic decisions and achieve academic excellence. Schedule a demo and download a free 14 day trial today to start streamlining data governance and informed decision-making. Start Transforming Data Governance at Your Institution Explore LIKE.TG's no-code solution by scheduling a demo to see how effortlessly you can manage your institution's data. Enhance success and make informed, strategic decisions that benefit your entire organization with LIKE.TG’s comprehensive tools. Request a Demo

Data Integrity vs. Data Quality in a Nutshell Data integrity refers to protecting data from anything that can harm or corrupt it, whereas data quality checks if the data is helpful for its intended purpose. Data quality is a subset of data integrity. One can have accurate, consistent, and error-free data, but it is only helpful once we have the supporting information for this data. Data integrity and quality are sometimes used interchangeably in data management, but they have different implications and distinct roles in enhancing data usability. The Importance of Data Quality and Data Integrity Data serves as the lifeblood of organizations, supporting every initiative from product development to marketing campaigns. The success of these decisions relies on the quality and trustworthiness of data, making data quality and integrity foundational to success. Data Quality: Empowering Informed Decision Making Data quality measures how well data meets requirements and fits the intended purpose. Experts usually assess it using various criteria, whose importance may vary based on the specific data, stakeholders, or intended use. Improved Decision Making Reliable analytics and insights depend on high-quality data. Data quality allows marketing campaigns to target audiences precisely. It also aligns product development with customer needs and supports data-backed operational improvements for maximum efficiency. Improved/Enhanced Customer Experience Organizations use complete and accurate customer data to personalize interactions through various platforms, like social media, websites, etc. High-quality data also helps anticipate the consumer’s needs and can identify issues swiftly to resolve them. This approach fosters customer loyalty and satisfaction, enhancing the brand’s perception. Optimized Operations High-quality data is a single source of truth, removing inconsistencies and discrepancies to prevent wasted effort. It streamlines workflows, reduces errors, and lessens the need for rework. As a result, productivity rises, costs drop, and overall efficiency improves. Data Integrity: Building Trust Data integrity concerns the inherent quality of data and aims to maintain this quality throughout the data lifecycle. This action includes all stages, from creation and storage to processing and analysis, ensuring the data remains accurate and consistent. Data security Security ensures that data remains protected from unauthorized access, modification, or deletion. Access controls, encryption, and intrusion detection systems prevent unauthorized individuals from altering or tampering with the data. Data security creates trust among partners and stakeholders and strengthens the organization’s reputation. Data lineage Data lineage tracks the origin and transformation of data. Lineage tracking upholds data integrity by keeping a clear audit trail of modifications and identifying the source and reason for each change. Auditability Auditing capabilities enable tracing changes to the data and identifying who made them. Logging all data modifications, including the time, responsible user, and nature of the change, reinforces data integrity. This process fosters transparency and accountability, which are crucial for building trust in the data. The Mutual Relationship Data quality and data integrity work together to enhance data usability. High-quality data becomes worthless if its integrity is not secure. Similarly, maintaining data integrity does not serve its purpose if the data is inaccurate or incomplete. For example, if we have a customer database filled with verified, complete information showing high data quality. However, if a system flaw allows unauthorized changes (indicating low data integrity), the entire database’s reliability is at risk. Data Integrity vs. Data Quality: Examples and Applications It’s evident that data quality and integrity are closely related, but understanding the subtle differences is essential to maximize the data’s value. Financial Reporting Consider a company preparing its quarterly financial report. Data integrity plays an important role in maintaining the accuracy and security of financial data. Data Security: Access controls restrict unauthorized users from modifying financial figures, safeguarding data integrity. Data Lineage: The company tracks the origin of revenue and cost data, ensuring it hasn’t been tampered with during its journey from sales figures to the final report. Auditability: Every modification made to the data, such as adjustments or corrections, is logged with timestamps and usernames. This audit trail allows for verification and ensures no fraudulent alteration of the data. Here, data integrity guarantees the financial report reflects the true state of the company’s finances, fostering trust with investors and stakeholders. Customer Segmentation Let’s consider a marketing team segmenting customers for a targeted email campaign. Here, data quality takes center stage: Accuracy: Customer email addresses must be accurate to ensure successful campaign delivery. Incorrect data (e.g., typos) would make the segmentation exercise futile. Completeness: Complete customer profiles, including purchase history and demographics, are crucial for effective segmentation. Missing data would limit the ability to create targeted customer groups. Consistency: Customer names and addresses should be formatted consistently across the database. Inconsistencies (e.g., variations in capitalization) can lead to duplicate entries and skewed results. How to Ensure Data Quality and Integrity Maintaining high data quality and data integrity requires a comprehensive data quality management strategy. Measures to Ensure Data Quality Data profiling: Data profiling helps pinpoint areas requiring improvement by identifying missing data, inconsistencies, outliers, and duplicate records. Regularly analyze data to determine such anomalies. Data cleansing: Implement processes to correct errors, remove duplicates, and ensure consistent formatting throughout the data set. Data cleansing involves using data cleaning tools and establishing clear data entry guidelines. Data Standardization: Data standardization transforms data into a format that computers can read and understand. By standardizing data, detecting errors and ensuring accuracy becomes much easier. This accuracy is essential for providing decision-makers with reliable and precise information. Data validation: Enforce data validation rules at the point of entry to prevent inaccurate or invalid data from reaching your destination systems. Validation includes defining acceptable value ranges, mandatory fields, and data type restrictions. Data quality metrics: Data quality metrics are tools to measure and improve data quality. Organizations can ensure they possess high-quality data by selecting and applying the appropriate metrics to evaluate the data. Data quality metrics include timeliness, completeness, accuracy, validity, duplication, and uniqueness. Data governance framework: Establish a data governance framework outlining data quality standards, ownership, and accountability. The framework should also define data quality metrics and procedures for monitoring and improving data health. Data lineage tracking: Implement data lineage tracking tools to understand the origin and transformations of data throughout its lifecycle. Data lineage tracking allows for tracing any potential issues back to their source. Measures to Ensure Data Integrity Remove duplicate data: Duplicate data creates ambiguity, leading to errors and breaches in data integrity. Large organizations employ dedicated teams to clean duplicate files. Whether to choose a team or utilize software to remove duplicates depends on the data volume or size of the organization. Access controls: Lacking effective access controls in an organization increases the risk to data integrity. Implementing the principle of least privilege is one of the most effective strategies. It only restricts access to essential users, maintaining strict control and preserving data integrity. Keep an audit trail: Audit trails give organizations clues to pinpoint the problem’s source for effective resolution as they record all system data, including database or file changes. They must be tamper-proof, preventing user manipulation. These trails should generate automatically, track every database and file event, link events to the users involved, and include timestamps for all occurrences. Regularly auditing these trails is a best practice to uncover weaknesses or areas for improvement and enhance data integrity. Data encryption: Data encryption protects data integrity within an organization by keeping it confidential. This security measure safeguards data during rest, i.e., when stored in a database and during transmission, for example, when moving to another database. Backup the data: To ensure data integrity, organizations should adopt a two-pronged approach. First, implement regular data backups to safeguard the information against potential losses from hardware malfunctions or cyberattacks. Secondly, establish a data recovery plan to enable the accurate restoration of data in accidental deletion or corruption cases. Data Integrity vs. Data Quality Feature Data Quality Data Integrity Focus Inherent characteristics of the data itself Maintaining the trustworthiness of data throughout its lifecycle Objective Ensures data is fit for its intended purpose Ensures data remains accurate, reliable, and unaltered Key Attributes Accuracy, Completeness, Consistency, Validity, Timeliness Security, Lineage, Auditability Impact Affects data analysis, decision-making, and operational efficiency Affects, compliance, and risk management Mechanism Data cleansing tools, data validation rules, data governance framework Encryption, access controls, audit trails, data backup and recovery Concluding Thoughts Data quality and data integrity are distinctive concepts but not mutually exclusive. A comprehensive data management strategy considers both enhancing data analyses and business decisions. Automated data management tools with built-in features to address data quality and integrity issues help organizations ensure their business decisions rely on healthy data. LIKE.TG provides a unified data management solution that helps you ensure data quality and integrity. With LIKE.TG, you can automate data cleansing, profiling, and validation tasks while leveraging built-in data governance features, such as data discovery, data quality rules, and data ownership—all within a single, no-code, user-friendly platform. Schedule a demo or download a free 14 day trial to experience LIKE.TG’s data management solution and improve your organizational data quality and integrity. Enhance Your Data Quality and Integrity with LIKE.TG Discover how LIKE.TG's solutions can elevate your data quality and integrity. Schedule a demo today to see how easy and efficient data management can be with our comprehensive, no-code platform. Discover how LIKE.TG's data management solutions can elevate your data quality and integrity. Schedule a demo or start your free trial today to see how easy and efficient data management can be with our comprehensive, no-code platform. Trust your data's accuracy and security with LIKE.TG. Request a Demo

What is a Data Governance Framework? A data governance framework is a structured way of managing and controlling the use of data in an organization. It helps establish policies, assign roles and responsibilities, and maintain data quality and security in compliance with relevant regulatory standards. The framework, therefore, provides detailed documentation about the organization’s data architecture, which is necessary to govern its data assets. Moreover, the framework supports self-service tools, which help technical and non-technical users find and use the data they need for governance and analytics. With these tools, organizations can manage, change, and share data across all their systems, whether in the cloud or on-site. Why is a Data Governance Framework Needed? The data governance framework is important for applying consistent policies and rules to all organizational data, ensuring data reliability for various roles, such as business leaders, data stewards, and developers. Data Inaccuracy A data governance framework sets standards and processes to ensure data accuracy and consistency. Many organizations face challenges with inaccurate, inconsistent, or outdated data affecting insights and decision-making processes. The data governance framework enhances the quality and reliability of the organization’s data. Data Security It sets guidelines and controls to protect sensitive information, including encryption, access controls, and compliance measures to reduce security risks and comply with regulations. Data Silos A data governance framework simplifies data integration and standardization, breaks down silos by establishing control, and enables seamless data exchange and collaboration across the organization. Lack of Accountability and Ownership It emphasizes accountability by defining roles and responsibilities and assigning data stewards, owners, and custodians to oversee data management practices and enforce governance policies effectively. Inefficient Data Management This framework establishes structured processes and workflows for data management. It automates repetitive tasks, streamlines workflows, and improves operational efficiency. Benefits of a Data Governance Framework It provides a structured way to keep data across all business operations accurate and secure while ensuring it’s used responsibly. Sets Standards Accountability The initial phase of data governance is the establishment of clear standards, norms, responsibilities, ownership, and roles. This process ensures all members of the organization, from new hires to top executives, are aware of their duties in data management. The organization can avoid data mismanagement by setting defined accountabilities and uphold data quality and security. Establishes Key Indicators Metrics Indicators and metrics offer a detailed view of the data’s condition and safety, guiding strategic decisions. Key Quality Indicators (KQIs) gauge data quality, helping businesses ensure their data meets the required standards. Key Data Elements (KDEs) identify the most critical data within the organization, guiding data management priorities. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) track data performance against business objectives, ensuring data aligns with company goals. Data Risk and Privacy Metrics measure the organization’s exposure to data breaches and compliance with privacy laws, which is essential for the regulatory environment. Builds a Unified Data Language A common business language and data quality rules help everyone in the organization understand data terms and standards similarly. This approach avoids confusion and errors in data management and use, making communication across the company more straightforward. Enhances Data Discovery Management The framework sets up methods for finding and understanding all the company’s data. This process involves figuring out how data is related and its history, handling different kinds of information and conducting data profiling and classification. These steps make it easier to manage data well, ensuring it’s correct and dependable for making decisions. A robust data governance framework helps in: Improving and managing data quality to ensure data is accurate and useful. Addressing data issues promptly to maintain data integrity. Identifying data owners to establish accountability for data assets. Building a data catalog to organize and classify data, making it easily accessible. Creating reference and master data to provide consistent data across the organization. Driving data literacy across the organization to enhance understanding and use of data. Provisioning and delivering data efficiently ensures it is available when and where needed. Pillars of a Data Governance Framework A comprehensive data governance framework relies upon fundamental pillars that ensure an organization’s effective and secure use of data assets. They combine the foundational elements with essential strategic approaches, creating a well-rounded framework for managing data across all enterprise levels. Data Quality Data quality is essential to a data governance framework as it implements the rules and processes for data validation, cleansing, and organization. It guarantees decision-makers access to accurate and consistent information, improving decision-making. Data Integration Data integration simplifies data governance by aggregating and harmonizing data from various sources across an organization into a unified view. This approach supports improved analysis, reporting, and decision-making by providing stakeholders with a complete business picture. Consequently, it ensures all organizational data adheres to set policies and compliance standards, reducing inconsistencies and errors. Data integration also improves data governance by allowing for centralized management, which makes it easier to control data quality, security, and access. It standardizes data handling practices throughout the organization, ensuring consistent implementation and monitoring of governance policies. Integrated data systems clean and correct data during consolidation, enhancing data quality and reliability for decision-making. This streamlined approach helps meet regulatory compliance and increases reporting efficiency, as all data is consistent and readily available. Data Privacy and Security This pillar is essential for keeping data assets confidential and available within the governance framework. It refers to managing and protecting data in a way that aligns with the organization’s data governance policies. Privacy means ensuring that data is secure from unauthorized access and readily available to authorized users, all under the oversight and rules established by the governance framework. Organizations can protect data by using strong encryption, setting access controls, and following compliance mechanisms. It builds trust among customers, partners, and stakeholders, protects the organization’s reputation, and reduces the risk of legal and financial fallout from data breaches. Data Architecture The role of data architecture is to provide a structured framework for designing, organizing, and managing data assets. Data architecture ensures data is stored, accessed, and used consistently by defining data models, schemas, and storage mechanisms. A clear data architecture aids data governance by setting straightforward guidelines for managing data, ensuring it complies with organizational policies and standards. Data Asset Governance It highlights the need to treat all data elements, including dashboards, code, and data science models, as essential assets within the governance framework throughout their lifecycle. It suggests adopting a comprehensive view of governance covering data and analytics to ensure thorough management and oversight of all data assets. Bottom-Up Approach As data use increases, companies should share the role of data governance across creators and users of data. This decentralized approach gives everyone responsibility for data governance, aligning them with more inclusive and collaborative data management models like data mesh. It means that governance is spread across different business areas, with each domain owner looking after their data while following the broader organizational guidelines. Routine Workflow Governance Data governance shouldn’t just be about meeting compliance or seen as an extra task. Instead, teams should integrate it into everyday work processes to make sure they base decisions on accurate data. It then becomes an essential element of strategic decision-making within the organization. A data governance framework is incomplete without its core elements: people, processes, and technology. Each plays a critical role in making the framework effective. People: The Core of Governance Successful data governance relies on collaboration and careful planning by people across the organization. Key considerations to implement and establish data governance include: Commitment: Assessing whether individuals are dedicated to the principles of data governance. Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly defining and formally documenting the roles and responsibilities of all involved in data governance. Skills and Data Literacy: Ensuring team members possess the necessary skills and understanding of data to implement governance strategies effectively. Change Management: Developing a plan with sponsors to support alignment and encourage organization-wide buy-in. Stakeholder Identification: Recognizing data governance stakeholders across the organization. Maintaining Expertise: Understanding where expertise resides within the organization to leverage it for governance initiatives. Processes Processes like data collection, storage, integration, and quality assurance are vital for verifying that data management practices are consistent across the enterprise. Important aspects to consider while handling these processes are: Realistic Definitions and Goals: Establishing practical and achievable data definitions, rules, and objectives. Modernization of Business Processes: Updating business processes to integrate data governance, enhancing the ability to deliver meaningful results. Integration of Governance: Reviewing and adjusting business rules to incorporate data governance seamlessly. Contributors include business and IT experts who provide the necessary context for data governance efforts. They are essential in: Technology: Enabling Effective Governance Technology provides the tools and platforms for implementing reliable data governance processes, such as data profiling, lineage, and metadata tools, and utilizing technology to automate, scale, and accelerate the data governance processes. How do Data Governance Frameworks Work? Data governance frameworks differ from one business to another, but they generally include several core components discussed above that guide how data is managed and used within an organization. Let us discuss further how these frameworks typically work. Understanding Ownership Ownership is identifying who sets up the rules, policies, definitions, and standards for managing data. For instance, a company can establish a Data Governance Office (DGO) to lead the data governance initiative. The initiative could include a dedicated team, a group of stakeholders, or even a single person, such as a data architect, depending on the size and needs of the organization. Data stewards are appointed across various departments to ensure everyone aligns with these standards and to offer recommendations. In larger companies, several councils can focus on different aspects of data management, such as data storage, quality, and protection. Setting Goals Defining clear goals and metrics is key to measuring the success of a data governance initiative. The Data Governance Institute suggests focusing on the impact of data governance initiatives on: How well they are aligned with the organizational objectives. The effectiveness in improving data quality and compliance in projects. The integration of governance principles into professional disciplines. The adoption of data governance practices among individuals within the organization. For example, a healthcare provider can set a goal to reduce patient data errors by 20% in the first year to improve patient care and reduce billing mistakes. Monitoring Performance Keeping track of how well the data governance framework is working involves setting accountabilities for tasks necessary for compliance, like assigning a data steward or appointing a data security officer. These tasks should be well-documented, repeatable, and cover various aspects of data governance, such as assigning decision rights, managing changes, resolving issues, and ensuring data quality. For instance, a financial institution can implement a system to regularly review and update access rights to sensitive financial data, ensuring only authorized personnel can view or modify this information. Approving Technology Choosing and approving technology is another important aspect, where stakeholders decide on the tools and systems used to process, store, and secure data. It also guarantees these technologies have the necessary controls to prevent data breaches. For example, relevant personnel in an e-commerce company may decide to approve using a cloud storage solution that offers encryption and multi-factor authentication to protect customer data. Establishing Collaboration Standards Deciding how data stakeholders create, use, or regulate data within the organization will collaborate, including determining who should be involved in decision-making processes and who needs to be informed about decisions. For instance, a manufacturing firm can include engineers, production managers, and quality control specialists in the discussions on collecting and using production line data to improve efficiency and product quality. Data Governance Framework Examples There are various tried and tested data governance frameworks in use. Each framework meets the needs and requirements of managing data effectively. The DAMA International Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK) DAMA-DMBOK is a comprehensive framework that outlines the standard industry practices for data management. It covers many topics, including data governance, architecture, and modeling, providing a holistic approach to managing and governing data assets. The Data Governance Institute Framework (DGI) The Data Governance Institute (DGI) offers a framework focusing on governance practices. It emphasizes establishing roles, responsibilities, and processes to ensure data is managed as an asset. This framework is particularly beneficial for organizations looking to implement data governance with a clear emphasis on accountability and stewardship. The CMMI Data Management Maturity (DMM) Model The Data Management Maturity (DMM) model provides a comprehensive approach to enhancing an organization’s data governance practices. It outlines the essential components of data governance, including data quality, operations, and platforms, offering a path toward achieving higher levels of data management maturity. The EDM Council’s Data Management Capability Assessment Model (DCAM) The EDM Council’s DCAM is an industry-standard framework for evaluating and improving data management and governance practices. DCAM provides a structured approach with defined principles and capabilities across various aspects of data governance, including data architecture, quality management, and security. ISO/IEC 38500 IT Governance Framework Although ISO/IEC 38500 is primarily an IT governance framework, it has significant implications for data governance. It guides organizations using IT (including data assets) to achieve business goals, ensure regulatory compliance, and manage risks. How to Create a Data Governance Framework? Building and implementing a data governance framework involves a strategic process that prioritizes properly managing an organization’s data assets. This framework is essential for enhancing data governance across businesses. The following step-by-step guide simplifies the approach: 1. Understanding Data Governance a. Define the scope and objectives of the data governance initiative. b. Align stakeholders with data governance goals, such as improving decision-making, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enhancing operational efficiency. 2. Identifying Data Domains a. Categorize data into domains based on their relevance to the business, such as customer data, product data, financial data, etc. b. Understand the data landscape to manage data across the organization effectively. 3. Identifying Ownership Consumption a. Determine data owners responsible for the accuracy, privacy, and security of each data domain. b. Identify data consumers who need access to the data for their work. c. Establish accountability and clarity on roles and responsibilities. 4. Validating Documenting Data a. Document the data lifecycle, including its origin, internal flow, user interactions, and application purposes. b. Verify data accuracy and consistency. c. Record governance policies, standards, and procedures for reference and clarity in data management. 5. Assessing Data Security a. Conduct security and risk assessments on various data types to identify vulnerabilities and threats. b. Prioritize risks and implement protective measures for sensitive information. c. Ensure compliance with legal requirements and build trust with clients and partners by demonstrating a commitment to data security. Data Governance Framework Best Practices Businesses should embrace certain best practices to create a practical data governance framework that ensures long-term success. These practices aim to meet current needs while also adapting to future challenges. Engage Stakeholders Early in the Process Involve key stakeholders from various departments in defining the scope and objectives of data governance to align all activities with organizational goals and priorities. Utilize Data Catalogs Implement data catalogs to categorize and document data assets. This approach is about organizing data efficiently, making it easily accessible and understandable to users within the organization. It facilitates easy identification of data domains and ownership responsibilities by providing visibility into data assets and their associated metadata. Appoint Data Stewards Appoint dedicated data stewards for each data domain to oversee data quality and serve as contact points for all data-related queries. These stewards enforce data governance policies, maintaining the quality and security of the data within their respective domains. Automate Documentation Processes Leverage automation tools to streamline the documentation of data lifecycles, governance policies, and procedures. These tools enhance efficiency and accuracy in maintaining up-to-date records of data management activities. Conduct Regular Training Provide ongoing training sessions to educate stakeholders on data governance principles, best practices, and compliance requirements. This training ensures all participants understand and effectively implement the organization’s data governance policies. Implement Data Security Measures Use security mechanism such as encryption, access controls, and monitoring systems to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, breaches, and compliance violations. Final Thoughts A strong data governance framework equips organizations to manage and derive maximum value from their data assets proactively. Companies can implement a framework by carefully engaging stakeholders, defining roles, and extensive planning. Implementing a data governance framework demands a commitment to continuous improvement and flexibility in response to new business and technology shifts. For successful implementation, using data governance tools or data management tools with governance features is essential. LIKE.TG’s platform simplifies data governance for businesses, offering tools for comprehensive data management. It allows for clearly assigning roles and responsibilities, ensuring data stewards and owners can easily oversee and control their data. This transparency aids in implementing governance policies and upholding data integrity organization-wide. LIKE.TG enables you to use your data more effectively and achieve better business results, all while minimizing data complexities. Start a free trial or book a demo today to explore LIKE.TG’s data management and governance solutions suite. Start Your Journey to Effective Data Governance with LIKE.TG Start managing your data more effectively with LIKE.TG. 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Data Governance vs. Data Quality Data governance and data quality are closely related, but different concepts. The major difference lies in their respective objectives within an organization’s data management framework. Data quality is primarily concerned with the data’s condition. It ensures the data is complete, accurate, reliable, and consistent. On the other hand, data governance refers to the overall management, maintaining compliance, and ensuring the security of data assets within an organization. Data governance sets the framework and guidelines under which data quality initiatives operate. Both data governance and quality are equally important for an organization to derive value from their data and make informed decisions. Understanding Data Quality Data quality measures how much data sets meet the specific requirements and expectations of their intended use, ensuring that decisions based on good quality data are rational and defensible. The significance of data quality stems from its role in decision-making. High-quality data allows organizations to understand their customers and identify new market trends. It ensures that: Marketing campaigns reach the right audience. Financial forecasts are reliable. Customer service is effective and personalized. Achieving high data quality is not a one-time activity but an ongoing, iterative process, called data quality management. It involves a series of steps, from data acquisition through storage and management to its final use. At each stage, specific measures must be taken to ensure data integrity. For example, data validation rules can be applied during collection to prevent errors, while regular audits can identify inconsistencies or outdated information that may affect data reliability. Understanding Data Governance Data governance is a thorough framework that ensures data is accurate, accessible, consistent, and protected, thereby supporting the organization’s objectives. Take data governance as a rulebook for effective data management, establishing protocols for the accurate collection, storage, and utilization of data. Data governance helps a company achieve its goals by providing a well-structured framework and setting clear and well-communicated policies that give all employees a common understanding of how data should be handled. This structure also defines the responsibilities of different roles within the organization, such as who is accountable for maintaining the accuracy of data and who has the authority to access sensitive information. The sensitivity of personal data and growing privacy concerns make data governance all the more important for organizations. In 2022, there were 1,774 instances of organizational data breaches, affecting over 392 million individuals globally. These incidents exposed legally protected personal information of people utilizing services ranging from financial and healthcare to social services. Exploring the Differences Between Data Governance and Data Quality Data Quality Data Governance Objective To ensure that the data is standardized and free of inconsistencies and errors. To ensure effective management, protection, compliance and utilization of organizational data. Techniques Data profiling, cleansing, standardization, enrichment, and validation. Data lineage, access controls, policy development, data stewardship, data cataloging and metadata management. Tools Data quality tools, specialized databases designed to support data quality tasks. Data governance platforms such as LIKE.TG and meta data management tools. Outcome Trustworthy data that can be used reliably for decision making. A controlled data environment, having clear data policies and improved data management practices. Where Data Governance and Data Quality Overlap The overlap between data governance and data quality lies in their mutual goal of ensuring that data is a reliable asset for the enterprise. Data governance determines who needs to do what with which data under specific conditions and identifies procedures and tools to enhance data quality. Data quality ensures that the data is accurate, complete, and valuable within this system. The connection between data quality and data governance comes from shared standards, metrics, and responsibilities of data roles. It helps create a symbiotic relationship that enhances the overall value of an organization’s data: Framework and Execution: Data governance provides the framework and policies for data management, while data quality focuses on executing these policies. For instance, data governance might establish a policy that all data should be consistent and accurate. Data quality measures like data cleaning and validation, would then be used to ensure that this policy is effectively implemented. Enhancing Trust: Data governance and data quality work together to enhance trust in data. Data governance ensures clear policies and procedures for data management, which can increase confidence in the data. Meanwhile, data quality measures ensure that the data is accurate, reliable, and relevant, further enhancing trust. Risk Management: Data governance sets the rules for compliance with regulations and standards, while data quality ensures that the data adheres to these rules. This complementary relationship is crucial for risk management, as it helps to prevent breaches of regulations and standards, which can result in penalties and damage to the organization’s reputation. Decision-Making: High-quality data is essential for informed decision-making. Data governance ensures that the right data is available to the right people at the right time, while data quality ensures that this data is accurate and reliable. Together, they enable organizations to make decisions based on trustworthy data. Data cataloging is another area where data quality and governance overlap. From the governance perspective, a data catalog provides a holistic picture of what data exists and who’s responsible for it—allowing for setting data standards and access controls. On the data quality side, the catalog helps identify potential issues through data profiling and lineage tracking, which enables data stewards to implement processes for improving data accuracy and consistency. 6 Steps to Integrate Data Quality within a Data Governance Framework Integrating data quality within a data governance framework is a strategic initiative that significantly enhances the value of an organization’s data. Such integration ensures that data is well-managed but also accurate, reliable, and useful for decision-making. Here are some steps to effectively integrate data quality within a data governance framework: Define Data Quality Goals Begin by outlining what high-quality data means for your organization. This step generally includes accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and relevance. It is important to align these goals with the organization’s overall objectives and communicate them clearly to all stakeholders. Establish Data Quality Metrics After defining the goals for data quality, establish metrics to measure data health. Data quality metrics could include error rates, completeness percentages, or consistency scores. These quantitative measures will assess data quality and track improvements over time. Incorporate Data Quality into Policies Procedures All data governance policies and procedures, including those for data collection, storage, processing, and usage, should prioritize data quality as a critical consideration. Incorporating data quality into these procedures ensures its maintenance throughout the data lifecycle. Assign Data Quality Responsibilities Integrating data governance and data quality calls for assigning responsibilities for maintaining data health. For example, designating a data steward to define and enforce data quality standards for their assigned data, or establishing data quality roles within the IT department to focus on data profiling, data cleansing, and implementing data quality checks. Implement Data Quality Tools Techniques The use of data quality tools and techniques is crucial in improving the quality of data. Modern data quality tools combine data standardization, validation, profiling, and cleansing, along with several other features, in a single package. Automating data quality tasks with these tools simplifies data quality management. Monitor Improve Data Quality The final step is to monitor data quality using the established metrics continuously. Regular monitoring identifies any issues or trends and enables corrective action as needed. Incorporating data quality within a data governance framework allows organizations to ensure their data is well-managed, accurate, reliable, and valuable. Conclusion Data governance and data quality are closely linked, influencing the reliability and usability of data. Despite their differences in scope and application, data quality and data governance create a unified approach to data management, which allows companies to maximize the benefits of their data assets. Building on this, LIKE.TG offers an effective solution that simplifies sharing and managing data across a company through a single platform. LIKE.TG’s data management platform ensures data quality and trustworthiness by providing the percentage of data health based on defined data quality rules. It enhances organizational decision-making by automatically correcting errors, detecting inaccuracies, and standardizing data. Data governance contributes by organizing data assets, managing data access, and making data trustable and understandable. If you’re looking to enhance your decision-making process with easier access to data, consider book a demo now! Ready to boost your decision-making with high-quality, trustworthy data? Try LIKE.TG’s data governance platform to see how you can improve data health, correct errors, and standardize your data effortlessly. Start you 14-days-trial now!

Data filtering plays an instrumental role in reducing computational time and enhancing the accuracy of AI models. Given the increasing need for organizations to manage large volumes of data, leveraging data filtering has become indispensable. What Is Data Filtering? Data filtering is the process of narrowing down the most relevant information from a large dataset using specific conditions or criteria. It makes the analysis more focused and efficient. Data filtering lets you quickly analyze relevant data without sifting through the entire dataset. You can filter data regardless of type, including numbers, categories, text, and complex time-series data. Data Filtering vs. Data Sorting vs Data Sampling While data filtering helps process large volumes of data, it is not the only method. Data sampling and sorting can also help draw insights from a large dataset. Here’s a brief overview and comparison: Data Filtering: Selects a subset of data based on specific criteria. Data Sorting: Arrange data in a specified order, either ascending or descending. Data Sampling: Chooses a representative subset from a larger dataset for analysis. Parameter Data Filtering Data Sorting Data Sampling Purpose To narrow down data to meet specific conditions. To organize data in a meaningful order. To analyze a smaller, manageable subset of data that represents the whole. Process Uses criteria to include or exclude data. Rearrange data based on chosen attributes. Randomly or systematically selects data points from the entire dataset. Outcome A reduced dataset focused on relevant data points. An ordered dataset based on specific attributes. A smaller dataset that reflects the characteristics of the more extensive set. Each method can be used by itself or in combination to extract insights from large volumes of data. What is Data Filtering Used For? Evaluating a Dataset: Filtering aids in exploratory data analysis by helping identify patterns, trends, or anomalies within a dataset. Processing Records: Data filtering streamlines workflows by processing records based on predefined criteria. Remove Irrelevant Data: Filtered data can help remove irrelevant data before restructuring via pivoting, grouping/aggregating, or other means. Benefits of Using Data Filtering Organizations prioritizing data filtering are better positioned to derive valuable insights from their data. Here is how data filtering can help you gain a competitive advantage. Enhances Focus: Data filtering allows you to ignore irrelevant data, enabling a sharper focus on information that aligns with their goals, which can improve the quality of insights. Increases Accuracy: Filtering out outliers and erroneous records contributes to a more reliable data analysis process and improves the accuracy of the results. Optimizes Resource Use: Working with smaller, filtered datasets can reduce the resources needed for analysis, leading to potential cost savings. Supports Custom Analysis: Data filtering accommodates unique analytical needs across various projects or departments by creating datasets tailored to specific criteria. Types of Data Filtering Techniques Data filtering techniques can help you quickly access the data you need. Basic Filtering Methods Basic filtering involves simple techniques like range or set membership. For example, in a database of temperatures recorded throughout a year, a range filter could be used to select all records where the temperature was between 20°C and 30°C. Similarly, a set membership filter could select records for specific months, like June, July, and August. Filtering by Criteria Filtering by criteria involves more advanced filtering based on multiple criteria or conditions. For instance, an e-commerce company might filter customer data to target a marketing campaign. They could use multiple criteria, such as customers who have purchased over $100 in the last month, are in the 25-35 age range, and have previously bought electronic products. Filtering by Time Range Temporal filters work by selecting data within a specific time frame. A financial analyst might use a time range filter to analyze stock market trends by filtering transaction data to include only those that occurred in the last quarter. This helps focus on recent market behaviors and predict future trends. Text Filtering Text filtering includes techniques for filtering textual data, such as pattern matching. For example, a social media platform might filter posts containing specific keywords or phrases to monitor content related to a specific event or topic. Using pattern matching, they can filter all posts with the hashtag #EarthDay. Numeric Filtering Numeric filtering involves methods for filtering numerical data based on value thresholds. A healthcare database might be filtered to identify patients with high blood pressure by setting a numeric filter to include all records where the systolic pressure is above 140 mmHg and the diastolic pressure is above 90 mmHg. Custom Filtering Custom filtering refers to user-defined filters for specialized needs. A biologist studying a species’ population growth might create a custom filter to include data points that match a complex set of conditions, such as specific genetic markers, habitat types, and observed behaviors, to study the factors influencing population changes. These techniques can be applied to extract meaningful information from large datasets, aiding in analysis and decision-making processes. Data Filtering Tools and Software Data filtering can be performed via manual scripting or no-code solutions. Here’s an overview of these methods: Filtering Data Manually Manual data filtering often involves writing custom scripts in programming languages such as R or Python. These languages provide powerful libraries and functions for data manipulation. Example: In Python, the pandas library is commonly used for data analysis tasks. A data scientist might write a script using pandas to filter a dataset of customer feedback, selecting only entries that contain certain keywords related to a product feature of interest. The script could look something like this: Python import pandas as pd # Load the dataset df = pd.read_csv(‘customer_feedback.csv’) # Define the keywords of interest keywords = [‘battery life’, ‘screen’, ‘camera’] # Filter the dataset for feedback containing the keywords filtered_df = df[df[‘feedback’].str.contains(‘|’.join(keywords))] Using No-Code Data Filtering Software No-code data filtering software allows you to filter data through a graphical user interface (GUI) without writing code. These tools are designed to be user-friendly and accessible to people with little programming experience. With Regular Expressions capabilities, you have the flexibility to write custom filter expressions. Example: A bank’s marketing department wants to analyze customer transaction data to identify potential clients for a new investment product. The data includes various transaction types, amounts, and descriptions. The team is particularly interested in clients who have made large transactions in the past year that may indicate an interest in investment opportunities. Using a no-code data filtering tool, the marketing team can filter records that contain terms like ‘stock purchase,’ ‘bond investment,’ or ‘mutual fund’ in their transaction description field. They also set a numeric filter to include transactions above a certain amount. The tool’s GUI allows them to easily input these parameters without writing complex code. The result is a filtered list of clients who meet the criteria, which the bank can then use to target their marketing campaign for the new investment product. Feature Manual Filtering (Python/R) No-Code Data Filtering with Regular Expressions Ease of Use Requires programming knowledge User-friendly with intuitive GUI Pattern Matching Complex filter expressions need coding Simplified filter implementation Learning Curve Steep requires learning syntax Minimal, often with helpful tutorials Speed of Setup Time-consuming script development Quick setup with immediate results Accessibility Limited to those with coding skills Accessible to non-technical users Maintenance Requires ongoing script updates Often includes automatic updates Scalability Can be less efficient for large datasets Designed to handle big data efficiently Cost Efficiency Potential for higher long-term costs Cost-effective with subscription models Collaboration Less collaborative, more individual-focused Encourages collaboration with shared access Best Practices for Effective Data Filtering It’s essential to follow the best practices below to ensure that data filtering is as effective and efficient as possible: Define Clear Objectives Having clear goals for what you want to achieve with data filtering. Before you begin, ask yourself: What specific insights am I trying to obtain? Which data is relevant to my analysis? How will the filtered data be used? Clear objectives guide the filtering process, ensuring the results align with your analytical or operational goals. Understand Data Structure and Format A thorough understanding of the data’s structure and format is essential. Consider the following: Is the data structured, semi-structured, or unstructured? What are the data types of the columns I’m interested in? Are there any relationships between the data points that need to be preserved? Understanding these aspects helps apply the most appropriate filters and prevents potential issues such as data loss or misinterpretation. Utilize Multiple Filters for Complex Analysis For complex analysis, a single filter might not be sufficient. Instead, use a combination of filters to drill down into the data: Apply a range filter followed by a categorical filter to narrow your dataset. Use text filters with numeric filters to further segment the data. Multiple filters can provide a more nuanced view of the data, revealing deeper insights. Validate Results and Adjust Filters as Needed Regular validation of filtering results is essential to ensure accuracy. After applying filters, check if: The results meet your initial objectives. The filtered data makes sense in the context of your goals. Any anomalies or unexpected results need investigation. If the results aren’t satisfactory, adjust the filters and re-validate. This iterative process helps refine the filtering strategy to produce the best possible outcomes. Adhering to these best practices helps maximize the effectiveness of data filtering, leading to more reliable and actionable insights. Data filtering significantly enhances the computational efficiency of training AI models, improving their accuracy. The advent of no-code data filtering tools has further streamlined this process, enabling you to develop AI systems that are not only more precise but also more efficient. How LIKE.TG’s No-Code Data Filtering Saves 80% of Your Time LIKE.TG Dataprep is a no-code data filtering tool that eliminates the need for complex coding, streamlines repetitive tasks, ensures consistency across projects, and offers immediate insights into data health, collectively saving up to 80% of the time typically spent on data preparation. It offers: Drag-and-Drop Interface uses Point-and-Click fields to filter data, simplifying data preparation. Dataprep Recipes standardize data preparation across multiple datasets, significantly reducing time and effort. Data Health Visuals provide immediate visual feedback on the quality of your data, allowing you to quickly identify and address issues such as inconsistencies or missing values. Real-Time Grid provides a dynamic dataframe that updates in real-time as data is transformed within the platform, giving you an interactive view of the data and illustrating the immediate effects of data manipulation. Automated Dataflows: reduce the need for manual intervention. Intuitive Filter Expressions perform complex pattern matching through the user-friendly interface, saving time on writing and debugging code. Prebuilt Connectors enable quick integration with various data sources. Advanced Data Validation and Profiling ensure data accuracy and consistency, allowing you to validate data against predefined rules and profile data for quality analysis. Ready to transform data management and save valuable time? Try LIKE.TG Dataprep, the all-in-one data preparation tool that simplifies data filtering, integration, and transformation. Start your journey with LIKE.TG Dataprep today and revolutionize how you work with data!

What is Data Provenance? Data provenance is a method of creating a documented trail that accounts for data’s origin, creation, movement, and dissemination. It involves storing the ownership and process history of data objects to answer questions like, “When was data created?”, “Who created the data?” and “Why was it created? Data provenance is vital in establishing data lineage, which is essential for validating, debugging, auditing, and evaluating data quality and determining data reliability. Data Lineage vs. Data Provenance Data provenance and data lineage are the distinct and complementary perspectives of data management. Data lineage mainly provides a high-level trail of data’s journey (from origin to consumption), including any changes made. Data provenance is what adds depth to this trail. It tells us about data’s origins and the changes made to it and provides insights into who created the data, made those changes, data quality, etc. Learn more about the differences between data provenance vs. data lineage. Data Lineage Data Provenance Scope Tracks the entire data transformation journey (from source to destination). Focuses on the origin and historical record of the data. Focus “How” and “Where” the data is transformed. “Who” and “When” the data was created. Key Information Source, transformations, integrations. Source system, creation time, responsible entity. Data Representation Typically visualized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Often presented as metadata associated with the data element. Use Cases Identifying data errors, tracing changes, and ensuring consistency. Verifying data credibility, detecting bias, and regulatory compliance. The Importance of Data Provenance Data provenance is a fundamental requirement for ensuring trust, reliability, and efficacy of data-based decision making. Opaque Data Pipelines The growing complexity of modern data systems and pipelines makes it difficult to track data lineage. Businesses lack complete visibility into how data is transformed and moved across various systems, creating a blind spot for potential issues. Data provenance empowers businesses to understand how data flows through their systems by revealing data’s origin, transformations, and movements. This transparency allows for proactive identification of potential issues before they escalate. Data Quality Concerns Without clear data lineage, identifying inconsistencies and anomalies becomes a time-consuming task. Errors or biases can go undetected, potentially leading to flawed decisions with significant consequences. Data provenance facilitates the detection of anomalies and inconsistencies within data. By tracing the lineage, businesses can pinpoint the source of errors and correct them proactively to ensure data integrity. For instance, when a sales dashboard shows a sudden revenue spike, data provenance identifies where the anomaly started, facilitating quick resolution and preventing faulty data from affecting decisions. Navigating Regulations The rapid increase of data privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA mandates that organizations demonstrate responsible data governance. Data provenance enables organizations to prove their compliance with these regulations. In an audit, data provenance offers a clear trail that details the origin and handling of sensitive data, reducing potential legal issues and building trust with stakeholders. Empowers AI and Analytics The effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics relies on the quality and trustworthiness of data. Data provenance enables scientists to identify biases or inconsistencies that could distort model outputs by tracing data lineage. Also, it supports explainability in AI decision-making, tracing back to how the AI reached its conclusions. The Role of Data Provenance in Ensuring Data Integrity and Authenticity Verifying the Origin and Lineage Data provenance creates a verifiable data custody chain. It records data sources and all transformations, helping organizations spot and address potential impurities in data. For instance, an organization collects customer data from various sources and merges it into a single database. Data provenance verifies the origin of each data stream, ensuring the data remains untampered and free from inaccurate information during collection. This careful tracking builds trust in the data’s authenticity by allowing easy source verification. Detecting Unauthorized Modification It also helps organizations detect and prevent unauthorized changes by tracking changes to data points, making anomalies and inconsistencies visible. For instance, if a financial record changes unexpectedly, data provenance flags it for investigation. This process helps catch and fix unauthorized access or manipulations early, protecting data integrity. It also supports access control by tracking who interacts with data and pinpointing those responsible for changes. Facilitating Reproducibility and Auditability Reproducibility is the ability to replicate research and analytical results. Data provenance records the data used, its changes, and the analysis processes, allowing researchers to recreate a study’s original conditions accurately. The accurate replication prevents the spread of incorrect or misleading findings by allowing the independent verification of results. Data provenance also supports auditability by providing a clear audit trail for regulatory reviews or compliance audits. Identifying Errors in Data Pipelines Data lineage tracking enables organizations to spot and fix errors and biases in data pipelines. For example, if a loan approval algorithm shows bias against certain demographics, data provenance lets data scientists examine the training data. They can find and correct biases introduced during data collection or transformation. This process improves data pipelines, making them more accurate and fairer. How Does Data Provenance Work Data provenance works as a system that utilizes various technologies to enhance the integrity and trustworthiness of the data. Following mechanisms define its effectiveness: Metadata Management: The foundation of Data Provenance Data provenance relies on capturing metadata, which includes the data’s origin, creation time and date, transformations, and responsible individuals. Capturing a comprehensive metadata record creates a clear audit trail for each data point. Ensuring Data Integrity with Cryptographic Techniques Cryptographic techniques are mathematical tools to crawl and unscramble data for tamper-proof verification. Data provenance systems use cryptographic techniques for securing metadata and ensuring its immutability, which means that any change to data cannot go unnoticed. One key method is to assign cryptographic hashes, a unique fixed-size character string from a piece of data. Changes in data modify the hash value, making tampering evident when the stored hash doesn’t match the reassigned hash of the altered data. Utilizing Distributed Ledger Technology Businesses can use data provenance with distributed ledger technology (DLT), including blockchain, to secure and share data across a decentralized network. This approach removes the need for a central authority, as any changes to the data record require majority network validation. The majority network approval enhances transparency by blocking unauthorized changes. DLT also supports controlled access, allowing authorized stakeholders to view the audit trail and confirm a data point’s history, promoting trust and collaboration in data ecosystems. Verification with Automated Mechanisms Organizations can leverage data provenance tools to enable easy verification and lineage tracking, using metadata and cryptographic hashes to check data authenticity and integrity. Also, these tools provide user-friendly interfaces, allowing end-users to access and verify information directly. The ease of using such tools empowers people to assess the trustworthiness of their data confidently. Data Provenance Use Cases Supply Chain Transparency Data provenance allows supply chains to track the documented movement of goods from raw materials to finished products by creating a digital record of origin, processing steps, and certifications for each product. This transparency empowers them to verify the authenticity and quality of their products against predefined standards, ensuring compliance with laws and ethical sourcing practices. Cybersecurity Defenses Data provenance establishes a clear audit trail for data access and manipulation, through which organizations can pinpoint unauthorized activities and security breaches. It is specifically helpful in industries where faster response time to security incidents is essential, like the financial sector. Simplifying Claims Management Data provenance allows verification of claims origin, eliminating fraudulent submissions. It transforms dispute resolution with a clear audit trail that pinpoints the source of any discrepancies. Also, the ability to examine past data manipulation in claims enhances risk assessment, allowing for proactive identification of potential issues. This process leads to quicker fraud detection and reduced risks of non-compliance and fraud. Concluding Thoughts As our dependency on data grows, utilizing data provenance methods and techniques to ensure trust in data is imperative. Data provenance equips organizations with tools to make informed decisions based on reliable information. LIKE.TG is a comprehensive data management platform that equips organizations with tools to track and analyze data movement. Data lineage feature allows the tracing and transformation of data assets, from source to destination. Also, impact analysis helps to identify how data is modified and utilized through various pipelines, enhancing the understanding of dependencies and potential risks associated with data changes. Download a 14-day free trial to experience how LIKE.TG helps with data lineage and provenance. Enhance Your Data Transparency with LIKE.TG Experience LIKE.TG's comprehensive data management platform to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of your data. 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OLTP is a transaction-centric data processing that follows a three-tier architecture. Every day, businesses worldwide perform millions of financial transactions. This fact brings to mind client-facing personnel such as bank tellers and supermarket cashiers tapping away on keyboards and at cash registers, and with good reason. According to ACI Worldwide, a payment systems company, there was a 42.2% growth in global real-time transaction volumes in 2023, amounting to 266.2 billion transactions. However, businesses outside the financial and retail sectors also generate plenty of transactions daily. And each of these transactions requires safe storage for future review, usage, and other applications. Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) is designed to store these large volumes of transactional data in a data warehouse, and this blog discusses it in detail. Let’s begin. OLTP is distinguished by the following two factors: Its dedicated design, which supports the execution and recording of hundreds (or more) of concurrent transactions. The ‘online’ component in its name, which refers to how it leverages the internet to handle transactions in real-time. Examples of OLTP Systems ATMs and online banking processes Ticketing, booking, and reservation platforms Credit card payment processing systems Order entry Record-keeping OLTP vs. OLAP OLTP and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) are two different types of data processing systems that businesses use in conjunction with each other. While OLTP is primarily designed for recording transactions, OLAP databases are designed to help data teams query and analyze them. Here’s a comparison between the two: OLTP OLAP Built for quickly storing vast volumes of online transactions. Built to collect data from varying sources to enable data analysis. Designed for recording business transactions and operations in real-time. Designed to analyze all kinds of historical business data. OLTP queries are simple. OLAP queries are complex. Standard size ranges from 100 Mb to 10 GB. Larger than OLTP systems. Their typical size varies from 1 Tb to 100 Pb. Often modifies data and has a combination of read and write tasks. Doesn’t modify data and has read-only workloads. Needs frequent backups and a comprehensive recovery mechanism in place. Can be backed up infrequently without problems. Characteristics of OLTP Systems Quick Responses: OLTP systems boast rapid responses to facilitate real-time operations. Response time is typically measured in milliseconds. Indexed Datasets: These systems feature indexed datasets to help users search for, query, and retrieve data quickly. High Availability: Given an OLTP system’s importance in real-time applications, ensuring high availability minimizes downtime. Simpler Operations: Common operations include insertions, deletions, and data updates. These are all simpler operations since these systems don’t cater to complex analytical requirements. Which Databases are Used for OLTP Workloads? OLTP workloads need relational database management systems (RDBMS) for data storage and modification, as relational databases are purpose-built for transaction applications. Here are a few examples: 1. PostgreSQL/Postgres PostgreSQL’s customizability and flexibility make it ideal for OLTP. In particular, Postgres’ Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) enables simultaneous data access for multiple transactions while preventing one transaction from blocking another. This improves performance and efficiency. 2. Oracle Database Oracle Database is a comprehensive RDBMS that supports different use cases. Besides OLTP, Oracle Database is used for data warehousing and mixed (OLTP and data warehousing) applications. 3. Microsoft SQL Server Much like Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server also supports data warehousing and business intelligence-related tasks in addition to OLTP workloads. 4. MySQL MySQL is widely used as both an open-source and commercial RDBMS. Its scalability, ease of use, availability, and transactional capabilities make it a great option for OLTP workloads. 5. MongoDB MongoDB is flexible, scalable, and suitable for enterprises looking for a NoSQL option to process their OLTP workloads. Payment systems are among MongoDB’s common use cases, and it has a flexible document-centric model that works well for OLTP tasks. The Benefits and Challenges of Working with OLTP Workloads OLTP systems have both their benefits and their challenges, highlighted below: Benefits: The two biggest benefits of an OLTP system are concurrency and ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) compliance. Concurrency allows an OLTP system to effectively and simultaneously cater to multiple users. Two or more users can freely make transactions in a system because its concurrency will keep these transactions from conflicting or overlapping with each other. ACID compliance comprises the following components: Atomicity: breaks database transactions down into smaller components to ensure the integrity of the transaction as a whole. Consistency: database transactions are subject to certain data validation rules and only the data that matches these rules is written into the database. Isolation: database transactions are concurrently processed without any conflicts. Durability: ensures that after a transaction is complete, the resulting data changes are written into the database. This maintains data changes despite technical faults. ACID compliance enables OLTP databases to manage transactions from start to finish. It ensures the functionality of a transaction by breaking down each transaction into smaller components, applying data validity rules, processing them concurrently, and then saving the data. Besides concurrency and ACID compliance, other advantages of an OLTP system include: Normalized Data: OLTP systems generally use normalized data structures. Doing so minimizes redundancy, enables optimized storage, and prevents data anomalies. Transaction Rollback: An OLTP system’s transaction rollback capability lets users reverse transactions or other changes in case of a hardware issue or another type of error. Data Integrity: Maintaining data integrity and consistency is easy as ACID compliance and normalization increase the transactions’ reliability and keep the database accurate. Challenges Common challenges associated with using OLTP databases include: Querying Historical Data: They are built for handling current transactions and real-time data. Consequently, querying historical data using an OLTP system is difficult, especially compared to OLAP. ACID Overheads: ACID compliance, while beneficial, can lead to some overhead. Better data integrity can affect the system’s performance, as ACID transactions require additional processing power overhead. Frequent Maintenance: Maintaining complex OLTP systems can be somewhat resource-intensive in a dynamic and expansive environment. As noted above, these systems need frequent backups, maintenance, and optimization, which require dedicated, ongoing efforts to maintain high availability. How to Select the Right Database for OLTP Workloads Keeping the following factors in mind can help data teams select the right database: Understanding Performance Requirements Knowing the estimated transaction volume, concurrency requirements, and ideal response times is essential. The selected database should effectively handle an organization’s transactional load. Support for ACID Compliance ACID compliance is vital for ensuring data integrity in an OLTP system, so a database with comprehensive ACID guarantees is the right fit for an OLTP workload. Concurrency Control Simultaneous transactions are another key feature; managing them effectively requires a database to have sufficient concurrency control mechanisms, such as: Locking Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) Timestamp Ordering Snapshot Isolation Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) Scalability Scalability can have varying importance depending on the business model and application. A database that can scale horizontally (by integrating more servers) as well as vertically (by increasing server resources) can keep up with a range of workloads. Data Model Generally, relational databases work well with structured data, and NoSQL databases are more suitable for semi-structured and unstructured data. Database selection for OLTP workloads should match the application’s schema requirements. Durability and Fault Tolerance Mechanisms such as replication, automatic failover, and backups assist with data durability and fault tolerance, making them necessary for preventing data loss. Consistency Models A database can feature one of the following consistency models: Strong Consistency: This model provides immediate and consistent visibility of updates across all nodes. This is the highest consistency level but may increase latency and decrease availability. Eventual Consistency: In this model, synchronous updates eventually bring all replicas into the same state. Since it prioritizes low latency and high availability, it’s a better choice for distributed systems. Causal Consistency: Causally related operations are consistently ordered across nodes in this model. It preserves the causal relationship between events and balances consistency and performance. Since each model has a trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, data personnel can select one based on the application requirements. Security Security capabilities may vary between databases, but features such as authorization, encrypting, authentication, and auditing can boost compliance with organizational security policies and regulations. Community and Support Infrastructure A database’s support services and the size of its community are also important factors to consider. A large, active community can be a useful resource for learning best practices and acquiring insights, and a support ecosystem can help troubleshoot issues quickly. Cost A database’s total cost of ownership (TCO) — which includes licensing, infrastructure costs, maintenance, and support expenditure — can impact its viability for a business. Ideally, a database should provide good value for money and meet organizational requirements. Conclusion Having been around since the 1970s, online transaction processing systems support transactional applications across a wide range of sectors. There has been progress towards combining OLTP and OLAP systems on a unified platform (such as MySQL Heatwave by Oracle). However, OLTP systems largely maintain their distinct functionality, which organizations can fully leverage by using the right database. LIKE.TG features built-in connectors for different databases — such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle — for running OLTP workloads. Its hassle-free, no-code platform lets users design and deploy OLTP data models easily. Reach out to our team to learn more.

According to Gartner, 80% of companies worldwide are expected to have efficient data management systems in place by 2025. This projection highlights the growing recognition of data governance tools as essential enablers for maintaining and enhancing the quality and security of organizational data within these data management systems. In this blog, we will talk about some of the best data governance tools and software to consider in 2024. The goal is to help analyze different tools select the right solution for your company. Understanding Data Governance At its core, data governance is about taking control of the data management process. It guarantees that your data is accurate, accessible, and secure, making it a reliable foundation for decision-making. As such, data governance leads to data that is healthy and used responsibly and effectively, with a clear understanding of its source, who has access to it, and how it can be used. Today, data breaches are all too common, and regulatory demands like GDPR and CCPA require strict data handling procedures. By using modern data governance software, you rest assured that your company-wide data is handled safely and ethically, ultimately helping you to build trust with your clients and partners. What are Data Governance Tools? Data governance tools are software and solutions that are the backbone for managing a company’s data ecosystem. These software applications are engineered to facilitate the organization, quality control, and protection of data assets. Note that the terms “data governance tools,” “data governance software,” “data governance solutions,” and “data governance platforms” all convey similar meanings and are used interchangeably in the article. Key Functions of Data Governance Tools Data governance tools are essential in managing your organization’s data and keeping it well-organized, so your teams can easily retrieve and access it. These tools automatically scan and index databases and files to identify and eliminate errors and inaccuracies in the data sets, providing reliable data for decision-making. Data governance tools are also significant in protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, which enhances security in the face of rising cybersecurity threats. They support compliance with strict regulations, such as GDPR, by tracking the financial data lifecycle and documenting data storage, usage, and sharing practices. These tools assist in making personalized recommendations by providing a framework to analyze customer data. This personalization, in turn, enhances customer experience and supports the development of business strategies backed by accurate data. How Data Governance Tools Work In practice, data governance tools have become a part of the overall data management strategy. Given the complexity of today’s data stacks, data teams frequently use these tools with their existing data systems and processes, often leveraging automation and AI to scale their data governance efforts further. Therefore, these tools are crucial for modern data management across industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, and technology, as they help these industries manage vast amounts of data safely and smartly, maintaining accuracy and compliance with laws. Automated Data Discovery Classification With data governance software, you can automatically scan your organizational data landscape to identify and classify data stored on-premises or in the cloud. For example, modern data governance tools can recognize sensitive information, such as personally identifiable data or financial records, enabling you to categorize and better protect it. This way, users in your organization will be able to understand what data they have, how it’s categorized, and what data they need to work with, making data governance scalable and more manageable. Quality Control Mechanisms Data governance tools allow organizations to create specific guidelines on how data should be collected, stored, and used, ensuring everyone follows the same standards. They automate the oversight of data from its creation to its eventual archiving or deletion, ensuring that data is up-to-date and relevant. An example of this is the implementation of data retention policies that automatically archive data that has not been accessed for over a year, keeping the system efficient and reducing storage costs. Data Lineage Tracking Data lineage tracking is critical for regulatory compliance and for troubleshooting data issues. Therefore, organizations must understand the journey of their data from its origin to its current form to ensure transparency and auditability. Data governance tools offer advanced lineage features that visualize the flow of data through systems, helping organizations like banks trace data back to its source. Adapting Business Operations and Maintaining Data Transparency Data governance tools equip businesses with the flexibility to adjust their operational frameworks to stay aligned with the company’s evolving needs. For instance, as a company grows, these tools can help reconfigure data access permissions and workflows to match new organizational structures or compliance requirements. Furthermore, these tools can track data movement across various systems and processes. This traceability ensures that businesses can see where their data comes from, how it’s used, and where it goes, which is important for auditing and compliance. An example is when a customer makes a purchase; data governance tools can trace the customer’s data from the point-of-sale system, through the inventory management system, and into the financial reporting system. Best Data Governance Tools to Consider in 2024 1. LIKE.TG LIKE.TG Data Stack is meticulously designed to reinforce data governance across organizations, providing a foundation for managing, securing, and leveraging data assets. Each feature of LIKE.TG directly contributes to enhancing data governance practices: Discover Data Easily: Use LIKE.TG’s advanced search and filtering to quickly locate the exact data you need, enhancing your ability to access and utilize information efficiently. Enrich Your Data: Attach relevant metadata to your data assets, building a shared understanding of each asset’s purpose and significantly improving data management practices. Own Your Data: Take control of governance for your data assets. As an owner, you directly handle access requests, confirming data is used appropriately and securely. Unify Data Language: Establish a comprehensive business glossary. This glossary creates a shared set of terms and definitions across your organization, minimizing misunderstandings and standardizing data use. Set Data Quality Standards: Implement data quality rules to measure and ensure your data’s accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability, keeping your data trustworthy and up to date. Profile Your Data: Through data profiling, actively examine and summarize your datasets to understand their structure and quality. This process helps identify potential vulnerabilities, verifying your data is secure and effectively managed. 2. Ataccama One Ataccama One is a data governance and management solution that operates across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. It is an AI-driven tool that supports data governance teams, stewards, scientists, and engineers by streamlining data governance processes through automation and intelligence. Pros It offers governance features, including data lineage and access controls, establishing data security. Provides detailed profiling and management of metadata, allowing for improved data understanding and governance across the data lifecycle. Implements role-based access controls and stewardship capabilities, ensuring that authorized personnel access and manage data, aligning with governance policies. Cons Integrating Ataccama with your current systems can be complicated and needs technical skills. It is resource-intensive, especially when it comes to large datasets. 3. Collibra Collibra Data Governance is a component of the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud platform, designed to improve data governance and management within organizations. Pros Offers a Policy Manager application for centralized control of data policies and standards. Supports metadata documentation through its data dictionary, enabling users to easily find and understand data. Provides visualization of data lineage, showing the journey of data across systems and how it is processed and used. Cons Requires intensive training to use its advanced features and automation, which can be tough at first. Getting all its features to work well with the systems might be challenging if new to it. 4. Erwin Data Intelligence Erwin Data Intelligence by Quest streamlines enterprise data governance by offering tools that include data cataloging, quality assurance, and data literacy. Through its integrated approach, the software promotes informed decision-making and compliance with internal policies. Pros Collects and catalogs metadata, simplifying generating data lineage and performing data quality assessments. Helps create and maintain a centralized repository of business terms and definitions. Enables tracing of data origin and transformations throughout its lifecycle, supporting transparency, compliance, and auditability in data governance efforts. Cons The tool’s performance slows down with larger models, making report generation challenging. Generating reports for large models can be time-consuming and may lead to application crashes, resulting in lost changes. 5. Informatica Informatica offers a data governance solution that helps organizations manage and govern their data across multiple cloud platforms. Pros Automatically scans and indexes metadata, enhancing data understanding and governance. Integrates master data management and AI-based integration patterns to ensure accurate and consistent data. Offers visualization of data lineage and history, supporting automated tracing of data movement for impact analysis and compliance. Cons The tool’s high complexity demands extensive training and lacks customization options for relationships, limiting visual and integrative capabilities. Navigation is complicated and offers limited scheduling options, struggling with performance when multiple jobs are scheduled. 6. OvalEdge OvalEdge is a data management tool that automates data categorization and indexing. It works on-premises or in the cloud and offers data discovery, governance, and policy management features. Pros Utilizes NLP and ML to organize data with tags, usage statistics, and custom tags, simplifying data discovery and organization. Crawls data sources, including data lakes and analytics software, to index metadata, enhancing data understanding and governance. Generates reports on data usage and errors, offering valuable insights into data health and activity. Cons The data quality feature is underdeveloped and contains many minor bugs. The visual interface is prone to errors. 7. Talend Talend Data Fabric is a platform that combines data integration, quality, and governance functionalities. It aims to streamline data management across its lifecycle, from integration to governance. Pros Automatically crawls, organizes, and enriches metadata, while identifying data silos and assessing data trustworthiness. Facilitates a team-based workflow for setting priorities and tracking data governance projects, enhancing collaboration and efficiency in data management. Offers data lineage tracing and compliance tracking features, supporting data privacy efforts and regulatory compliance across the organization. Cons Managing complex data flows can become extremely complicated, making it difficult to debug and identify issues when unexpected results occur. The tool provides poor explanations for errors, often leaving you unsure why an error occurred. 8. IBM Cloud PAK IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a cloud-based platform that offers effective data governance, quality, and privacy management. It includes AI-powered data discovery, metadata enrichment, and quality management capabilities. Pros Utilizes machine learning to automate the discovery, profiling, and cataloging of data, streamlining the organization of metadata and data assets. Provides self-service portals for various roles, enabling easy access to data and facilitating collaborative data governance and analysis. Includes tools for creating visual representations of data relationships, profiles, and lineage, aiding in the understanding and using data. Cons The software struggles with user authentication complexities and limited control over secret management in IAM-enabled environments. It lacks a comprehensive training plan and the capability to enforce quotas, hindering effective data governance. 9. Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management OEMM is a tool for harvesting, cataloging, and governing metadata from various data sources. Its features enable organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of their metadata landscape. Pros Automatically gathers metadata from various sources, enabling a unified view across relational databases, data warehouses, and BI platforms. Offers detailed data lineage tracing and impact analysis functions, aiding in understanding the data flow and the implications of data changes. Seamlessly integrates with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, supporting a comprehensive data governance strategy. Cons The system demands extensive training for proper management and a complex interface that requires in-depth study before professional use. The user interface is prone to glitches and can be slow to respond, impacting efficiency and usability. 10. Alation Alation is designed to simplify managing data assets and governance policies in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. The Data Governance App aims to streamline secure access to reliable data across IT systems by incorporating AI and machine learning. Pros Allows users to create and map governance policies to specific data assets, facilitating clear and effective policy management. Provides AI-driven automated data curation functions and identifies potential data stewards, optimizing the stewardship process. Supports creating and configuring data governance workflows without requiring coding, making process setup more accessible. Cons The absence of term tables in the Alation Analytics area complicates managing business glossary creation. The BI functionality falls short compared to RDBMS support, with confusing data mapping and dashboard organization Benefits of Using Data Governance Tools Incorporating data governance tools into data management strategy gives organizations numerous advantages, revolutionizing how they handle, utilize, and exploit their data. Additionally, these tools enable organizations to leverage data in ways that could potentially lead to significant improvements in their operations and decision-making processes. Ensures Data Accuracy and Consistency Data governance software provides several quality features that ensure your data stays healthy. For example, by automatically checking and correcting data across systems, these tools help businesses avoid costly mistakes arising from inaccurate data, such as making poor strategic decisions or misreporting financials. Improves Compliance and Security Data governance tools help you manage data access, monitor usage, and protect sensitive information. Clarity on who has access to and is responsible for what data will help your data teams operate more efficiently and ensure compliance with data governance policies. Boosts Operational Efficiency Data governance tools facilitate streamlined business operations by automating several data management tasks. For instance, these tools help you organize data, making it easier and quicker for your data teams to locate the required information. Similarly, modern data governance platforms can automate access controls and lineage tracking, which means you can monitor data movement across your organization and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. Facilitates Better Decision-Making Strategically using data governance tools empowers you to make critical business decisions based on the most accurate and up-to-date information. These tools tackle two significant challenges to data-driven decision-making: data quality and accessibility. As such, these tools are precious in dynamic markets where strategic agility can provide your organization with a competitive edge. Enhances Data Security Maintaining trust and safeguarding intellectual property is a core component of a data governance framework, especially when your customers entrust you with vast amounts of sensitive information. A data governance platform with robust security features can help you secure organizational data sets. For example, you can implement encryption and access controls to protect data against unauthorized access. Reduces Costs Data governance tools can help your business avoid expenses related to manual data cleanup, regulatory fines, and data breaches. These platforms also offer a viable solution to ever-increasing storage costs by identifying and eliminating redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data. Furthermore, they enable more accurate forecasting and resource allocation, which leads to better overall financial management. Selecting the Right Data Governance Tool As evident by the list of data governance tools above, the market offers several platforms and solutions for data governance. While this competition will undoubtedly benefit the consumers, it can easily make selecting the right governance tool complex and time-consuming. However, you can make an informed decision if you consider certain important factors when selecting your organization’s ideal data governance tool. Here’s a detailed guide on what to keep in mind while browsing through different data governance solutions: Understanding of Data Landscape Before choosing a tool, it is essential to clearly understand data architecture, including where data resides, how it flows within the organization, and who uses it. This understanding will act as a guide in selecting a tool that can handle specific data ecosystems. It means choosing software that can integrate with the databases the organization utilizes, support their business processes, and accommodate their data formats. The goal is to find a tool that can interact with all aspects of an organization’s data landscape, from storage and processing to analysis and reporting, to facilitate effective data management across the entire entity. Define Data Governance Goals Identify what goal to achieve with data governance. Whether it’s improving data quality, certifying regulatory compliance, enhancing security, or fostering a data-driven culture, these goals will influence the right tool. When setting goals for data governance, an organization might aim to enhance data quality, ensure they meet regulatory standards, boost their data security, or develop a culture that values data-driven decisions. These objectives will guide them in choosing the most suitable data governance tool. For instance, if a company’s primary goal is to improve data quality, they would look for a tool that excels in identifying and correcting inaccuracies in their data. This process could mean selecting software that offers advanced data profiling and cleansing capabilities, enabling the organization to detect errors automatically and ensure their data is accurate and reliable. Ease of Use Ease of use is essential when selecting the right data governance tool. It directly impacts how quickly your team can adopt and effectively utilize it. A user-friendly interface and intuitive features mean less time spent on training and more on achieving your data governance goals. For example, suppose a tool offers a straightforward dashboard where users can easily navigate to find data quality metrics, manage data access, or set governance policies. In that case, your team is more likely to use it efficiently and accurately. This ease of use ensures you can leverage the data to drive decision-making and value creation rather than struggling with complex software. Assess the Flexibility for Integration The tool should easily fit in with your existing data systems and workflows to avoid data silos and redundancy. This flexibility minimizes disruptions as your data teams leverage the current IT infrastructure and technology. For example, if your company uses a specific CRM and analytics platform, the right data governance tool should easily connect to both, allowing for seamless data flow and management. This connection means your team can continue working with familiar systems while benefiting from data governance capabilities, such as improved data quality and access control, without drastic changes to their daily processes. Scalability And Flexibility To meet the fifth criterion, data governance tools must scale and flex with your data’s growth and diversity. They should manage your data’s increasing size, different types, and the speed at which it’s generated. Moreover, as the demands and roles of those who use your data evolve, these tools must adapt, offering ways to tailor and tweak settings to match your unique governance needs. For example, a tool that integrates seamlessly with your current databases and analytics platforms while allowing you to define who can access what data ensures that your governance system grows with your company. Cost And Value Assessing the cost and the value that data governance tools bring is essential. These tools must justify their expense by significantly lowering data-related risks, boosting the reliability of your data, and increasing its overall worth. They should align with your financial constraints and resource availability, offering flexible payment options like monthly subscriptions, one-time licenses, or usage-based fees. Furthermore, they must include support and upkeep services to ensure smooth operation. For instance, investing in a tool that offers detailed analytics on data usage and quality improvements can show a tangible return on investment by enhancing decision-making processes and compliance, making it a cost-effective choice for your data governance strategy. Evaluate the Support and Community Consider the vendor’s level of support, including training, customer service, and community forums. A strong support network can ease the implementation process and maximize the tool’s value for your organization. For instance, imagine a tool with comprehensive training modules, a responsive customer service team, and an active user community. This environment means you can quickly learn how to use the tool effectively, get help when encountering problems, and exchange tips with other users. Such support smooths out the initial learning curve and ensures ongoing assistance and improvement, making it easier for your organization to adopt and benefit from the tool. Must-Have Features in a Good Data Governance Tool Metadata Management Beyond cataloging, the tool should offer deep insights into the data’s metadata, allowing us to understand its lineage, quality, and lifecycle. This feature is crucial for tracing data back to its source and understanding its transformation over time. Workflow Automation for Data Stewardship Automating governance workflows can significantly improve efficiency and ensure consistent application of governance policies. Look for tools that offer customizable workflows to match the governance processes. Collaborative Features for Cross-Team Engagement Data governance is a cross-functional effort. The tool should promote collaboration across different departments, enabling users to contribute to data quality, compliance, and management. Advanced Security Features Beyond basic access controls, seek tools offering sophisticated security features like anomaly detection, encryption, and detailed audit trails. This security is essential for protecting sensitive data and complying with stringent regulations. Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics The ability to generate detailed reports is important for monitoring the effectiveness of your data governance initiatives. These insights can help fnd areas for improvement and demonstrate compliance with regulatory bodies. Concluding Thoughts Data governance tools are essential for businesses to keep their data accurate, safe, and in line with rules and regulations. These tools help businesses use their data well, ensuring every information is valuable and secure. LIKE.TG Data Stack is an all-in-one solution for efficiently managing and governing data. Its easy-to-use interface allows data handling without the need to code. Whether combining data sources, cleaning data, or ensuring it meets quality standards, LIKE.TG simplifies the process. If you’re looking to improve how you manage your data, give LIKE.TG Data Stack a try. Visit our website and sign up for a 14-day free trial. Experience how LIKE.TG can make data governance straightforward and effective for businesses. Take Control of Your Data with LIKE.TG Ready to streamline your data management and governance processes? Try LIKE.TG Data Stack today and experience how easy it can be to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance. Sign up for a 14-day free trial on our website and see the difference. Start a Free Trial

If you use a CRM system and want to integrate it with your applications and systems, you can use LIKE.TG’s Custom API (CAPI) Connectors for seamless connectivity within minutes. Connecting to a CRM system is ideal because it enables you to get your data in a centralized location, eliminating the need to download files every time you want to access your CRM data. In this blog, we’ll show you how to connect your CRM system using LIKE.TG’s CAPI Connectors. LIKE.TG CAPI Connectors LIKE.TG CAPI Connectors enable seamless connectivity to various CRMs, BI tools, drives, databases, social media, and other platforms through API integration. Our GitHub repository offers a diverse collection of API-based connectors, ensuring effortless access to data from a wide range of sources and making it part of your data pipelines. The key benefits of LIKE.TG CAPI Connectors include: User-Friendly Interface: CAPI Connectors simplify the connectivity process by offering a drag-and-drop functionality. This intuitive interface empowers users to connect with any platform that supports API effortlessly. Streamline Workflows: With a vast collection of API-based connectors available in the GitHub repository, you have the flexibility to connect with various systems and platforms. Customization Options: If you don’t find the desired connector in the existing list, LIKE.TG CAPI Connectors offer the advantage of creating custom connectors within a few hours. Time and Cost Savings: By providing an extensive range of pre-built connectors and the ability to create custom connectors quickly, LIKE.TG CAPI Connectors saves both time and costs associated with developing connectivity solutions from scratch. Using CAPI Connectors, you can create and maintain custom API collections even if the API provider does not offer existing documentation for its APIs. Connect your CRM system Using LIKE.TG’s CAPI Connector Step 1: Click the Import API button in the API Browser. The API Browser shows a consolidated view to import, maintain and access all your CAPI connectors. Step 2: Set the API Import Source as Custom Connectors. Let’s say you want to connect to AgileCRM. In the Connectors field, select Agile CRM and import it to the project. Step 3: Configure the API Server URL and add authentication details. Step 4: To the left, you have all API operations for Agile CRM data resources available in the API Browser. In this example, we have simply drag-and-drop List Contacts and add it to the flow designer. Step 5: You can simply transform and write the data of your choice to your desired destination, which can be an application or a database. In this example, we’ve exported the List Contact data to a Database table destination. Step 6: Using the data preview feature, you can get an instant preview of the output data in the same window. This allows you to review and verify your datasets. That’s it! In just a few simple steps, you can connect your CRM to your databases, applications, or systems. Learn More Pre-built Custom Connectors Create or customize API Collection API Browser Connect to Slate CRM Using LIKE.TG Slate CRM is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software designed for higher education institutions. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for recruitment, admissions, enrollment management, communication, event management, reporting, and analytics. Its features include application processing, communication automation, data segmentation, personalized messaging, event planning, and tracking of engagement metrics. Using LIKE.TG, you can connect to Slate CRM in minutes. Using the steps above, you can create a custom API to connect to Slate CRM in minutes. Since Slate CRM has APIs available for rapid integration, you can readily import the API to be used as a CAPI connector. This means that you can get access to real-time data within minutes. To learn more, contact our sales team today!

What is metadata management? Before shedding light on metadata management, it is crucial to understand what metadata is. Metadata refers to the information about your data. This data includes elements representing its context, content, and characteristics. It helps you discover, access, use, store, and retrieve your data, having a wide spread of variations. Metadata of an image. Image by LIKE.TG. Let’s look at some of the metadata types below: Operational metadata: details how and when data occurs and transforms. This metadata type helps to manage, monitor, and optimize system architecture performance. Examples include time stamps, execution logs, data lineage, and dependency mapping. Legal metadata: involves the legal aspects of data use. This variation aims to protect data creators and regulate how one uses data. Examples include copyrights, licensing, and usage rights. Descriptive metadata: describes content (what, when, where, and who). It helps to identify, discover, find, and use data resources. Examples include title, author, keywords, and summary. Technical metadata: includes technical details of the data file. This metadata variation ensures proper data interpretation by software programs. Examples include file size, format (pdf, jpeg), encoding (UTF-8), and compression type. Process metadata: tracks data handling steps. It ensures data quality and reproducibility by documenting how the data was derived and transformed, including its origin. Examples include actions (such as data cleaning steps), tools used, tests performed, and lineage (data source). Preservation metadata: preserves data for long-term access, ensuring it remains usable over time by providing information for future care. Examples include backup location, migration history (format changes), and digital signatures. Types of metadata. Image by LIKE.TG. To help you simplify your journey to metadata management, we will delve into the notion, explaining its significance, various types, how to structure it for optimal results, the value you will gain, what tools are involved, and how you can choose a fitting one, along with best practices ensuring value maximization. Let’s start with the basics. Metadata management is the “practice” of managing data about data. Metadata management helps create a common language for your data. In other words, it standardizes your data by collecting, organizing, and maintaining it using a set of activities, policies, and technologies. As a result, your data becomes quick to discover, easier to understand, and more accessible by humans and machines. Let’s take an example of a library catalog. A library wouldn’t just store books on random shelves; it would categorize them, label them, and have entries in a catalog system. Metadata management does the same thing for your data. It makes finding, interpreting, and using the metadata easier, helping you find what you need and ensuring it is error-free. As a result, everyone working with the core of data, including tech experts, salespersons, managers, and search engines, can better maximize its benefits, driving informed decisions. Example of metadata management Imagine a vast library of movies and shows on streaming platforms like Netflix or Prime Video as your data collection. It contains an extensive variety of content. This content is your data. However, finding that perfect movie becomes daunting without a proper cataloging system. This situation is where metadata management simplifies things. Each piece of content includes details such as title, genre, synopsis, actors, language, release date, and more—known as metadata. It functions like a detailed catalog entry, offering a quick guide for viewers to skim through the content and find what they like. As stated above, streaming services leverage metadata management to effectively categorize content (metadata) by multiple variables. Metadata enables them to deliver personalized recommendations, custom playlists, and dynamic grouping of content—all driven by metadata analytics. Subsequently, this strategy personalizes the streaming experience to match users’ preferences, making it easier for them to explore new favorites and revisit cherished classics. Master data management vs. Metadata management Before proceeding, it’s essential to clarify that while both master data management (MDM) and metadata management are crucial components of data management and governance, they are two unique concepts and, therefore, not interchangeable. Master data describes the core information necessary for the operations or transactions within a business. This data includes but is not limited to, the unique identifiers or attributes of business entities—for example, product IDs, customer names, and company branches. Master data management is a business function that aims to create a unified, accurate, and consistent view of this data. It involves collecting, cleaning, managing, sharing, and protecting this data to ensure everything runs smoothly. Examples include information like file formats such as mp3 for audio files and pdf for documents, among others. Metadata management is the strategy that centers on organizing, managing, and governing metadata. Why is metadata management important? Data is only valuable if it is reliable. It isn’t easy to know whether it is accurate, up-to-date, or relevant without proper context. Metadata management is elemental in providing this context to data and is the cornerstone for effective data governance and intelligent data management, ensuring your data is reliable and authentic. Using precise policies and standards, this practice helps you manage data about your data (metadata) and monitors its quality and relevance, ensuring compliance with regulations. Additionally, it uncovers insights that simplify data discovery, risks associated with it, its value, how to use it, and the relationship between data elements, enabling seamless data flow mapping. Moreover, when powered by AI and machine learning, metadata management solution terms as “active,”—meaning it attains potency to integrate with other applications, including data analytics programs and simultaneously gets enhanced by utilizing human knowledge, ultimately generating new and accurate insights. Interrelation between metadata and other applications. Image by LIKE.TG. Here are some of the questions different personas or teams within the same organization may ask themselves (thanks to metadata management) and assess their performance while ensuring a single source of truth for everyone: Ways metadata management empowers data-driven decisions across teams. Image by LIKE.TG. These value additions are only the tip of the iceberg. With over 5.44 billion global internet users as of April 2024, the amount of data created, stored, copied, and consumed is expected to explode to 181 zettabytes by 2025. That said, aptly managing the metadata of such breadth is more crucial than ever. Benefits of metadata management Having received various names, from “the business glossary for data” and “data cataloging” to being known as “a single source of truth,” metadata management plays a pivotal role comparable to that of the Rosetta Stone in the realm of data. It deciphers the meaning and context of data for everyone, just as the Rosetta Stone unlocked ancient Egypt’s history and culture, making it understandable. For a better understanding, let’s take a look at some of its benefits, making it indispensable for data-driven businesses: Data discoverability and usability Data consistency and unification End-to-end data lineage and governance Time and cost savings Data integration and collaboration Data discoverability and usability: Metadata management is a comprehensive data catalog that allows you to discover relevant datasets. This discoverability increases accessibility, enabling better data utilization and informed decision-making. Data consistency and unification: It establishes a standardized approach to defining data within an organization. Thus, each department has access to the metadata it needs to understand and manage its systems, data, and operations effectively. This practice fosters consistency, streamlines data governance, unifies the company’s approach to data, and leads to fewer data retrieval issues. End-to-end data lineage and governance: Metadata management records a dataset from its origin to each transformation it undergoes. These detailed logs help track data for regulations and perform data quality assessments and root cause analysis, ensuring data quality and risk mitigation. Time and cost savings: Automating and standardizing metadata management allows companies to reallocate their resources to high-priority tasks. This practice saves the resource time previously spent on manual tasks. Additionally, it leads to savings in areas like data design, conversion, and mapping. Data integration and collaboration: Metadata management allows seamless integration into various sources, systems, and applications by documenting data structures, formats, content, and relationships. Additionally, it helps grasp the connections and dependencies between different data assets, ensuring integration and collaboration across departments. Benefits of metadata management. Image by LIKE.TG. Due to such meaningful contributions, the metadata management market growth is surging globally, showing an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.18% from 2023 to 2028. Enterprise metadata management market – Growth rate by region. Source: Mordor Intelligence. How does metadata management work? Effective data utilization hinges on a solid data foundation. Metadata management provides this concrete shared foundation by organizing and comprehending data metadata. Here’s a breakdown of how it works: Step 1: Metadata collection It begins by collecting metadata from various data sources, including on-premises and cloud systems. These data sources include data lakes, warehouses, databases, file systems, applications, and data integration tools. This process aims to accurately understand the data’s structure, format, and content, ensuring its reliability and suitability for analytics and data science initiatives. Step 2: Metadata curation After collection, the raw metadata is curated with relevant business context for shared understanding. It is categorized and organized by purpose and usage, enriched with attributes and relationships. This data is then cataloged in a central repository, ensuring it is searchable and accessible. Furthermore, user feedback, including ratings, reviews, and certifications, further enhances its value by providing insights into its usefulness to others. Step 3: Intelligent metadata management The final step, intelligent metadata management, uses AI and machine learning to analyze these datasets deeply. These technologies examine metadata to discover data lineage, reveal hidden connections, and identify similar datasets, ranking them as per user needs. This process facilitates users with the discovery of the most relevant information for any given task. Ultimately, this approach transforms raw data into a strategic asset, empowering confident, data-driven decisions. What is a metadata management framework (MMF)? Metadata management framework refers to an organization’s approach to creating, processing, governing, and utilizing its metadata. This framework encompasses the following components: Goal and objective: Identifying a focused area you’re trying to solve or improve. Stakeholders: Engaging relevant data owners from the beginning ensures the framework is shaped correctly from the start. Strategy: Defining the types of metadata that you will work on and setting priority goals and objectives for metadata management. Architecture: Outlining standards, models, and guidelines to ensure a unified approach across the organization. Processes: Creating processes and workflows for collecting, documenting, and maintaining metadata with defined roles and responsibilities. Tools and Technologies: Selecting and implementing tools and technologies that are easy to use, allow dataset standardization, and align with your organization’s requirements and goals for data cataloging, modeling, repositories, profiling, and lineage. Integration: Ensuring your metadata integrates with the existing tech stack. Governance: Establishing metadata governance processes to ensure metadata integrity, security, and compliance. Additionally, setting up a data governance body to oversee your metadata management framework and resolve conflicts. Training and education: Offering training and education to enhance awareness and competencies in metadata management. This practice includes a comprehensive program that informs stakeholders about metadata management’s importance, their roles, and the use of established tools and processes. Continuous improvement: Regularly assessing and enhancing the framework based on user feedback and observed usage trends. LIKE.TG Metadata Management Framework Metadata management use cases Effective metadata management unlocks a wide range of functionalities for organizations. Let’s explore some of these applications: Improved efficiency and troubleshooting Enhanced data analytics Data utilization and cost-optimization Automated data security and compliance Effective data governance Streamlined onboarding and integration Improved efficiency and troubleshooting: Automated lineage tracking, a vital metadata management component, visualizes data flow from its origin to any transformations it undergoes. This approach empowers data teams to analyze root cause with lightning speed by pinpointing the exact source of problems within queries or reports. As a result, it saves a significant chunk of time for data professionals, improving problem-solving capabilities across the team. Enhanced data analytics: Well-managed metadata is fundamental to delivering quality and consistency – the prerequisites of effective data analytics. It facilitates self-service analytics and business intelligence initiatives by making data assets more readily discoverable and accessible to business users, fostering a data-driven culture. Data utilization and cost-optimization: By analyzing usage patterns, such as identifying frequently or infrequently accessed tables or inefficient queries, metadata management enables organizations to make informed decisions on optimizing their data storage and processing resources. These insights allow cost-saving costs and enhanced data warehouse efficiency. Automated data security and compliance: Metadata management is critical in automating data classification in line with regulatory requirements (e.g., PII under EU GDPR or internal team data). This mechanism enforces security protocols, helping organizations maintain compliance and data security while reducing risks associated with data breaches. Effective data governance: Data governance requires a comprehensive view of data to realize its potential fully. Metadata management enables this, managing the entire data lifecycle while ensuring its quality, accessibility, availability, and security. Streamlined onboarding and integration: An enterprise metadata management software provides end users direct access to relevant metadata within their tools, simplifying onboarding processes and organizational integration for new employees. Metadata management tools A metadata management tool is software designed to help organizations collect, organize, store, and manage metadata efficiently. These tools enable organizations to fully understand and leverage their data, providing a centralized system for cataloging, monitoring, and analyzing data lineage, relationships, and usage patterns. Capabilities of a metadata management solution Metadata management tools encompass many features like data catalog, business glossary, data lineage, data profiling, interoperability, and impact analysis. Their market is expected to go through a compound annual growth rate of 18.4% by 2029. Although these tools offer numerous benefits, it is essential to carefully assess the program before adopting one. Here are some of the capabilities to look for in a metadata management solution: Data inventory: What data do you have, and where is it stored? Data inventory, also known as data mapping, acts like a directory, listing all your organization’s data assets and where they’re stored. This granular view facilitates data governance by ensuring response data usage. For instance, you can track how the data you retrieved (i.e., response data) from the metadata research (e.g., customer names) is used later. This capability lets you see who is accessing the data, how the respective person uses it, and its impact on the data (data lineage). Data catalog: Where is our data, and how can we access it? Unlike data inventories, data catalogs are like advanced search engines for your data. These automated tools actively scan and catalog data across various storage locations – databases, data lakes, and data warehouses – making it much easier for business users to discover the specific datasets they need. Data lineage: Where has our data been, and what changes did it go through? Data lineage acts like a behind-the-scenes map for your data. It tracks the journey of your data from its origin (i.e., source) through any transformation it undergoes to where it is ultimately used (i.e., destination). This information is beneficial for impact analysis, where you must predict the consequences of changes to data sources or processing methods. Tagging How can we enrich and adapt our data for future needs? Tagging involves assigning relevant labels, called metadata tags, to data inventory to categorize and describe them with keywords, making them highly searchable and adaptable to changing business needs. Some tools can even automate tagging based on patterns, saving time and reducing errors. Data matching How can we ensure our metadata accurately reflects data asset relationships? Data matching helps identify connections between different pieces of metadata. Take an example of two datasets that might have similar information but slightly differ in names or formats. Metadata management tools with built-in data matching capability automatically compare these datasets and identify potential matches, making your data searches more accurate. Collaboration What does our data mean (offer context) to our teams? Effective metadata management requires clear communication between teams about data definitions and usage. So, collaboration features like commenting, annotations, and version control create a central platform for dialogue on these aspects. For which documenting every interaction among teams is vital and must be offered by the metadata management solution. This transparency fosters knowledge sharing, helps address inconsistencies in data understanding, and ultimately leads to better, data-driven decisions. Six questions to ask when choosing a metadata management tool. Image by LIKE.TG. Metadata management best practices Here are some of the ways you can utilize to maximize your metadata management value and its sustainability: Establish a unified metadata foundation: Create a central repository for metadata to provide insights across all data management practices. Harness the power of all six metadata categories: Drive metadata-driven intelligence by capturing the six metadata categories – operational, legal, descriptive, technical, process, and preservation – to maximize the value of your data. Integrate AI/ML to augment your metadata management: Leverage AI/ML on top of your unified metadata foundation to make cloud data processes intelligent and adaptable. Empower users with an AI-powered data catalog: Capture and enrich enterprise metadata with business context using an AI-powered data catalog, making relevant data discoverable, accessible, understandable, and trustworthy. Ensure scalable and comprehensive metadata management: Achieve unparalleled management of metadata, offering extensive connectivity across multi-cloud, on-premises environments, applications, and ETL/BI tools; deep metadata extraction and data lineage comprehension capabilities (e.g., through database code parsing) and scalability to support millions of metadata assets, fulfilling the demands of the modern data landscape. Govern AI/ML models effectively: Establish governance for AI/ML models by managing their metadata, enabling performance measurement against business objectives, and mitigating algorithmic biases. Establish a metadata leadership program: Ensure metadata leaders are part of the governance team to operationalize metadata management policies, fostering success through leading by example. Invest in an appropriate metadata management tool: Once you have finalized your metadata strategy, scope, roles, and standards, you’ll be equipped to identify the essential features your business requires in a metadata management system. This analysis may lead you to acquire a new, dedicated tool or leverage existing metadata repositories within your current data management or business intelligence tools. Maintain consistency across the organization: Once initiated, consistently create metadata following policies and standards and communicate its significance to all data users and stakeholders, ensuring their commitment and engagement. Final Words Like a map empowers exploration, well-managed metadata helps maximize your data value. Metadata management establishes a standardized approach for describing and organizing your data assets. It enhances data discoverability and understanding, enhancing informed decision-making at all levels. LIKE.TG’s metadata-driven data warehousing tool helps you prioritize metadata management by automating your metadata’s discovery, categorization, and management. It provides enterprise-wide shared data understanding, making your metadata easily searchable and readily interpretable. At LIKE.TG, we help organizations unlock the true potential of their data and establish data-driven success. Request a live product demonstration to see it in action, or get in touch with our experts to explore how LIKE.TG DW Builder can easily enrich your metadata infrastructure! Automate Metadata Management with LIKE.TG Unified Metadata-Driven Solution By automating metadata discovery, categorization, and management, LIKE.TG creates a standardized approach that improves data discoverability and understanding — fostering informed decision-making across all organizational levels. Explore how our metadata-driven toolworks. Download Free 14-Day Trial