Joins allow you to examine relationships between two or more profiled data sources, no matter what the original data source. Venn diagrams are available to help you to better visualize the intersection of your data that joins represent.
You can add permanent and discovered joins to the Discovery Center to help you gain insight into possible issues that might arise when you attempt to join data in your environment. For example, you can isolate issues related to duplicate or orphaned records (rows), allowing you to design error handling procedures before merging your data.
The following are other analysis tasks you can perform:
- Data Assessment. As you examine joins, you may also want to assess the suitability of that data for integration or cleansing processes which involve merges or joins between files and/or database tables.
- Disparate File Assessment. Depending on your data profiling needs, you may want to examine relationships between disparate files and tables. For example, COBOL files merging with Oracle database tables. To help you anticipate the results of a data join or merge, you can perform 'what if' scenarios on selected files or tables that you would include in a join or merge process.
- Migration and Integration Projects. When planning a migration or integration project, often the source data is in a different format than the target data. Some of your data integration projects may require that you take source data from multiple sources and perform merges and data transformations that result in the data being placed in a single target data source.