Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor, Yellowfin, has launched what it claims is the industry’s first integrated and virtualised Data Preparation Module for analytics.  Data preparation describes the process of transforming data into consistent formats suitable for exploration, analysis and report building.

The new Data Preparation Module offers users a way to model, profile, clean, shape, enrich, secure and publish all data desired for reporting and analytics in a single BI environment.  The Data Preparation Module will be included as part of a standard Yellowfin license at no additional cost.

“With this release, Yellowfin has delivered another first for the BI and analytics software industry,” said Yellowfin co-founder and CEO, Glen Rabie. 

“Yellowfin’s Data Preparation Module truly supports the needs of data analysts, enterprise IT and business users,” said Rabie.  Data analysts can independently prepare data for analysis in less time, IT can easily govern that data, and business users have fast access to data they can trust in order to make critical business decisions.”

Yellowfin’s Data Preparation Module has been designed to overcome common challenges encountered when preparing data for analytics in three ways, by:

• Integrating data preparation processes directly into a single analytics environment
• Offering comprehensive data profiling capabilities
• Providing automated best practice metadata modelling functionality

Rabie said the problem with traditional data preparation was that it forced organisations to undertake data migration processes, which put data governance and security at risk.

“Moving data from one environment to another increases the risk of unauthorised data access,” said Rabie.  “A virtualised approach means data analysts can directly connect to, prepare and analyse data sources in one place.

“Delivering virtualised data preparation will empower Yellowfin’s clients to maintain unparalleled governance, consistency and security across of all data and analytics content.  Any data preparation actions performed will be uniformly reflected across all content – from reports and charts, to dashboards and Storyboards.”

Yellowfin’s data profiling capabilities enable data analysts to quickly assess the shape and quality of their data.  The data profiling functionality visually displays the number and distribution of data profiled, providing statistics on the values within each column (such as minimum, maximum, median, average, empty and distinct values or outliers).

Types of transformations available via Yellowfin’s data profiling functionality include the ability to perform numeric and date grouping; apply filters, formatting, case statements and calculated fields; append, standardize or remove incomplete or inaccurate values; translate values held in the data source into business-friendly terminology (Organization Reference Codes); and assess a data set for attributes (such as zip or post code data) that would enable users to enrich data by adding a Yellowfin GeoPack.  Yellowfin GeoPacks are pre-packed geospatial and demographic data points for specific countries or regions.  GeoPacks can be downloaded from the Yellowfin Marketplace.

Yellowfin’s new Data Preparation Module was launched alongside the latest version of the vendor’s BI platform, Yellowfin 7.3. Yellowfin 7.3 contains enhancements to Yellowfin’s advanced data visualisation capabilities, including the introduction of Set Analysis, and a new Content Creation Canvas.

www.yellowfinbi.com