Reviewing data relationships helps you better understand the structure of your data and allows you to make better informed decisions regarding your data quality and remediation projects. When you drill down to relationship analysis, each join, key, and dependency relationship has a status of either:
- Discovered—found as a potential relationship but not yet reviewed for validity.
- Permanent—reviewed and verified. These represent relationships you want to save for further use.
You can change the status of a relationship depending on your needs and the validity of the analysis.
Guidelines: Note the following
guidelines when reviewing analysis and deciding on the status of each relationship.
- Dependencies. A dependency is a many-to-one data relationship where one or more attributes determine the value of another attribute within a single data source. After data is imported into a repository, review the results by examining each potential (discovered) dependency and decide which status it should have. For example, set a dependency to permanent if it is a potential dependency and has been verified against the full data volume.
- Keys. A key consists of one or more attributes that uniquely identify and associate data within a data source. After your data is imported into a repository, review the potential (discovered) keys and determine whether they are relevant to your data investigation. You could set to permanent a potential key that has been verified against the full data volume. Alternately, you could change the status of a key that is permanent, but should be discovered.
- Joins. A join represents an intersection of identical or related data across two or more data sources. Review join analysis results and decide whether to change the status of a join. For example, set to permanent a discovered join that you want to keep for further relationship analysis. Or, maybe the join is on an attribute that can act as an alternative unique identifier and therefore might be useful when there are issues with keys or when you want to create cross application joins.
To review data relationship analysis and change status