Traditional approaches to enterprise reporting, analysis and Business Intelligence such as Data Warehousing, upfront modelling and ETL have given way to new, more agile tools and ideas. Within this landscape Data Preparation tools have become very popular for good reason. Data preparation has traditionally been a very manual task and consumed the bulk of most data project’s time. Profiling data, standardising it and transforming it has traditionally been very manual and error prone. This has derailed many Data Warehousing and analysis projects as they become bogged down with infrastructure and consistency issues rather than focusing on the true value add – producing good quality analysis.
Fortunately the latest generation of tools, typically powered by NoSQL technologies take a lot of this pain away. They enable users with reasonable technical skills to rapidly explore, understand and analyse datasets ranging from small data to data that is petabytes in scale. Most tools also feature a variety of adaptors meaning that a variety of structured and semi-structured sources such as spreadsheets, database tables and XML / JSON content can also be explored and analysed.
It’s never been easier to rapidly derive value from disparate data. Here are 10 top tools that have impressed the consultants at Data to Value.
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Paxata is a self-service adaptive data preparation platform that lets analysts quickly and painlessly collect, explore, combine and transform data. It offers high flexibility not requiring pre-defined models when analysing raw data, moreover it works with a wide variety of formats or data management systems for users to easily see relationships across various data-sets.
Alteryx is a tool that enables a user to blend data from different sources in one seamless workflow. Alteryx minimises the need for extensive data preparation, enabling a user to easily access the data they need. It can handle structured and unstructured data in different formats and from various sources. It also makes it easy for users with different expertise to collaborate together on a single workflow and solve problems more efficiently.
Lavastorm analytics engine helps business users to self-service large data-sets from virtually any source and any format, making quick business decisions easy without rigorous modelling scripting or planning.
