Data Preparation

#Terms

WHAT IS… ?

Data preparation is the second step in the data analysis process, following collection of data and before analysis. It can be divided into five broad stages: data wrangling, cleaning, integration, transformation and loading (known as ‘the data life cycle’), though these are not necessarily discrete steps. Good preparation of raw data is critical to achieving good results in the later analysis

HOW IS IT USED ?

Data preparation is a business process and domain in data management. Data preparation is the process for extracting data from various sources (including flat files, spreadsheets, XML files, and legacy databases), preparing it for use in downstream activities such as storage or analysis, and appending metadata so that it can be accessed using database queries. Data preparation tools, or extract-transform-load (ETL) tools, are used to preprocess data for loading into application data stores and databases.