InfoSphere Information Analyzer tasks

You can use InfoSphere® Information Analyzer to complete selected integration tasks as required or combine them into a larger integration flow.

Your organization can use InfoSphere Information Analyzer to complete the following tasks:

Data profiling and analysis

Completing data profiling and analysis helps you to understand the structure, content, and quality of data. Users can identify data anomalies, validate column and table relationships, and drill down to exception rows for more detailed analysis of data inconsistencies. Data profiling helps detect data quality rules and relationships that users can refine based on the needs of your organization.

InfoSphere Information Analyzer helps to complete the following data profiling functions:

• Column analysis
• Key analysis (primary, natural, or foreign keys)
• Cross-domain analysis

Data monitoring and trending

Data rules help InfoSphere Information Analyzer users assess data completeness, validity, and formats, and determine whether value combinations are valid. Rules can be simple column measures that incorporate data profiling results, or can include complex conditions that test multiple data fields.

Business users can develop additional rules to assess and measure content and quality over time to complete trending and pattern analysis, and establish baselines across uncommon data sources. Users can evaluate new results against existing benchmarks to track data quality improvements.

Facilitating integration

InfoSphere Information Analyzer facilitates information integration by using the available source and target metadata, defined data rules, and validation tables to design new data integration tasks.

By generating a set of values that data rules compare source data against, InfoSphere Information Analyzer users can generate reference tables that are used for mapping, range checking, and validity checking. Data rules can be invoked in-stream as part of InfoSphere DataStage® and QualityStage® jobs, or within an InfoSphere Information Services Director web service. Rules or rule set definitions can be reused as a unique rule validation stage to ensure that incoming content meets prescribed rules, and that the outgoing contents can be created based on defined rule logic.

To promote collaboration and metadata integration, InfoSphere Information Analyzer users can access the results of data rules from the metadata repository, and share the results with users of other components in the InfoSphere Information Server suite. By using the built-in application programming interfaces (APIs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs), InfoSphere Information Analyzer users can deliver results as custom dashboards or applications outside of the InfoSphere Information Server suite.