Talend Unveils Open Source Data Profiler

Talend has introduced an open source data profiler that enables company to assess the quality of data and decide how to fix missing zip codes, incomplete addresses, wrong numbers or other incorrect information.

The Open Profiler helps IT teams profile data to identify potential problems before beginning projects such as data integration or application development, according to the company. The tool also enables business analysts to have more control over maintenance and management of the data.

Improving data quality helps prevent such time and money wasting problems as multiple mailings to the same customer, lost product shipments and missed sales opportunities, Talend said.

"Companies in every business face significant losses and inefficiencies that are caused directly by poor data quality," Bertrand Diard, chief executive and co-founder of Talend, said in a statement.

Key features in the new product include metadata discovery, which identifies the structure of the databases that need to be analyzed. The tool also provides the ability to define the statistics and metrics that need to be measured on each data item. Finally, graphs are used in presenting results to make it easier to assess data quality.

The Open Profiler, released this week, is available at no cost under the GNU General Public License. Other open source Talend tools include its flagship data-integration software Open Studio. In addition, Talend offers the Integration Suite, a subscription-based service that extends the functionality of Open Studio, and Talend On Demand, a software-as-a-service offering for data integration.