The Ultimate Data Preparation Kit
INTRODUCTION ď‚— Ultimate Data Preparation Kit, your guide to
ensuring that your organization develops a winning strategy for data preparation. Data preparation is becoming increasingly important with 80% of the time spent during data analysis devoted entirely to data prep. You’ll discover exactly what it takes to properly prepare your data, with practical tips and tricks to simply every step along the way!
Steps For Prearing Data For Analysis Define the business requirements : Eliciting requirements can be
straightforward or complex, depending on the type of project and the organization but don’t skip it! Failing to understand what the business expects to see can in the beginning can lead to lots of wasted time and effort later down the line.
Identify the data sources ď‚— The size of each dataset (in megabytes
or rows), and whether you will need to analyze the entire dataset or a subset. Be aware of the trade-off involved: bringing all the data in allows for more granular exploration, but could potentially affect performance.
Wrangle the data ď‚— Often data needs to be manually
transformed or manipulated for effective analysis. This could happen when various tables or datasets use different formats for the same information, or when you want to group data in new ways. To find out whether and how you need to change the data:
Connect the data If you’re working with many different data
sources and tables, you’ll need to model the data in a way that enables dashboard users to quickly receive answers to ad-hoc queries. This means: Find common fields which could be used to connect various datasets together. Considering the relationship that will occur and avoiding many-to-many relationship.
Load the data  If you’re not sure whether this is
necessary, consider whether you need to centralize all your data and have it all in one place, whether you have the sufficient hardware and software to crunch large datasets, and how this will affect your production environment.
Notes: ď‚—Read about various types of
analytical databases in our guide to BI database technology and Data Preparation kit: ď‚—http://tinyurl.com/z23682w