Before data can be used in a data warehouse, CRM, ERP or business analytics application, its content, quality and structure must be understood. Too often, mission-critical IT initiatives experience overruns or outright failures because those who are implementing them are relying upon an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the source data. This happens with good reason: databases are complex, the volumes of metadata and data can be vast and difficult to unravel, and the process of understanding source data using a manual process is tedious and prone to errors.

Similarity Systems helps to eliminate this age-old problem. By quickly providing a complete, 100 per cent accurate picture of your data through an automated process called Data Profiling, the Similarity Systems AXIO™ Product Suite (formerly Evoke AXIO) helps ensure that there are no surprises, so your valuable IT initiatives can proceed on time, on budget, with reduced risk.

Data Profiling
At the core of the profiling product suite, AXIO performs the sophisticated and complex process of Data Profiling, in which the content, structure and quality of highly complex data structures is defined. AXIO employs a combination of automated discovery and interactive analysis enabling a small team of business and data analysts to discover hidden data quality issues, inconsistencies, and incompatibilities between data sources and target applications.

The outputs of the Data Profiling process drive the Data Cleansing processes. The output includes a normalized data model that can be used to populate a staging area and as specifications for subsequent cleansing and transformation processes using Similarity Systems’ Data Quality suite ATHANOR.

All of this information is stored in the Similarity Systems Repository, allowing data issues to be addressed before data is moved into the target system.

Similarity Systems AXIO profiles data in three dimensions:

Column profiling - analyzes all the values within each column, or attribute. Discovers the TRUE metadata and content quality problems
Dependency profiling - examines each attribute in relation to every other attribute within a table, looking for dependency relationships. Discovers functional dependencies; primary keys; data structure quality problems
Redundancy profiling - compares data between tables, determining which attributes contain overlapping or identical sets of values. Discovers duplicate data across systems; foreign keys, synonyms, and homonyms; and values corrupting data integrity
Using the information gathered from the Data Profiling process, AXIO builds a 3rd normal form data model, in which unwanted redundancies are eliminated. The model can then be used as a staging area for movement to a fixed target, or as an operational data store.

Similarity Systems Repository
The Similarity Systems Repository houses all of the information generated in AXIO and makes it available for other products including ATHANOR for data cleansing and third-party movement and data integration products. Users can add 'tags' to the information stored in the Repository, which can include information about project management, data explanations, unresolved issues, logic for transformation and scrubbing and data rules.

BENEFITS:

Provides a central ‘storehouse’ for the information generated in AXIO
Allows information discovered about the data to be reused on any project that uses the same data
Using Results
AXIO’s data mapping capabilities allow accurate information about source data developed during the Data Profiling process to be used by other Similarity Systems products, third party products and applications. Similarity Systems AXIO FTM (Fixed Target Mapping) matches profiled data sources to existing targets, such as eCommerce applications, data warehouses and packaged CRM and ERP systems. Similarity Systems AXIO XML mapping goes a step further by supporting applications that utilize XML to communicate with back-end databases and beyond a company’s borders. And the business and IT community can use the results of Data Profiling to communicate effectively, understand their business processes and where they are flawed. By using the information stored in the Repository, they will ask the right questions, and will build better, more accurate plans and specifications

BENEFITS:

Similarity Systems’ AXIO’s mapping functions complete many of the steps necessary to get source data ready for use in applications and databases
Data modeling, mapping and movement¹ processes are more accurate when based on the accurate metadata generated by Similarity Systems AXIO