0 / 0
Profiling data assets

Profiling data assets

The profile of a data asset includes generated metadata and statistics about its content. An asset profile helps you understand what actions to take to improve the data quality. You can see the profile on the asset's Profile page in a catalog or in a project. All catalog or project members can see data asset profiles.

In governed catalogs, profiles for data assets are created automatically unless you disabled automatic profiling, the asset comes from a connection that is configured to use personal credentials, or the asset was profiled through metadata enrichment before it was published. You can manually create profiles for structured data assets in these cases:

  • In governed catalogs if the asset wasn't profiled before
  • In ungoverned catalogs
  • In projects

Profiles are updated when new enrichment results are published, but you can also update individual profiles manually. Unstructured data assets cannot be profiled.

You must have the Admin or Editor role in the project or catalog to create or update a profile for a structured data asset.

To manually create a profile for a structured data asset:

  1. Go to the asset's Profile page. If necessary, you are prompted to enter your personal credentials for the locked data connections.
  2. Optional. Click Select data classes, choose which data classes to include in the profile, and click Apply.
  3. Click Create profile.

You can update an existing profile for a structured data asset when the data changes or when you want to change the data classes to include in the profile. If you exclude a data class that was previously assigned to a column, the updated profile shows Class excluded (from profile) for the respective column unless a different data class was assigned. You will also see Class excluded (from profile) for any columns where you don't have access to the assigned data class.

During creation or update of a profile for a catalog asset, the side panes for the asset columns might show outdated governance information. Reload the page after profiling is complete to see the updated information.

The latest asset profile is retained and shown while the data asset exists in the catalog even if the original data in the data source is temporarily or permanently not available. To remove the profile information, you have these options:

  • You can manually delete the profile on the Profile page. This option is not available if the asset is subject to any data protection rules.
  • You can manually delete the data asset from the catalog.
  • If the asset was added through metadata import, you can rerun the metadata import with the appropriate the Delete on reimport option set.
Note: When you publish a structured data asset from a project to a catalog or add such asset to a project from a catalog where the project and the catalog belong to different accounts, the asset profile is not copied because the set of available data classes might be different. Therefore, you must create a new profile. If you publish to a governed catalog, profiling is started automatically.

Learn more

Parent topic: Catalog assets

Generative AI search and answer
These answers are generated by a large language model in watsonx.ai based on content from the product documentation. Learn more