candidate key

SSIS: Using Data Profiling Task to check the candidate key profile of unknown data source(s)

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As a part of Business Intelligence projects, we spend a significant amount in extracting, transforming and loading data from source systems. So it’s always helpful to know as much as you can about the data sources like NULLS, keys, statistics among other things. One of the things that I like to do if the data is unknown is to make sure that I get the candidate keys correct to make sure the key used can uniquely identify the rows in the data. It’s really helpful if you do this upfront because it would avoid a lot of duplicate value errors in your projects.

So here’s a quick tutorial on how you can check the candidate key profile using data profiling task in SSIS, You need to perform two main tasks:
1. Generate the xml file using the Data profiling task in SSIS
2. View the content of the xml file using the Data Profile Viewer Tool or using the Open Profile Viewer option in the Data Profiling task editor in SSIS.

Here are the steps:
1a. Open SQL Server Data Tools (Visual Studio/BIDS) and the SSIS project type
1b. Bring in Data Profiling Task on Control Flow
1c. Open the Data Profiler Task editor and configure the destination folder that the tasks uses to create the XML file. You can either create a new connection or use an existing one. If you use an existing connection, make sure that you are setting the OverwriteDestination property to True if you want the file to be overwritten at the destination.

1 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

1d. Click on Quick Profile to configure the data source for the data profiler task

2 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

1e. In the quick profile form, you’ll need to select the connection, table/view and also specify what you to need to computer. For candidate key profile, make sure that the candidate key profile box is checked.

3 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

1f. Run the Task and a XML file should be placed at the destination you specified in step 1C.

Now, It’s time to view what profiler captured.

2a. you can open “Data Profile Viewer” by searching for its name in the start button.

4 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

2b. once it opens up, click on open and browse to the xml file generated by the data profiling task.

5 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

2c. once the file opens up, you can the candidate key profiles.

6 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

2d. Alternatively, You can also open the data profile viewer from the “Data Profiling Task” in SSIS. Go to the Editor > Open Profile Viewer:

7 SSIS Data Profiling Task Data Cleaning Candidate Key

Conclusion:
In this post, you saw how to profile data using the Data Profiling Task in SSIS.