Product Overview: SAS Data Quality
SAS Data Quality is a comprehensive solution designed to help organizations assess, improve, monitor, and manage the quality of their data, whether it is structured or unstructured. This tool is engineered to support both small and midmarket businesses, as well as larger enterprises, by providing a robust and scalable data quality framework.
Key Functions
- Data Profiling and Monitoring: SAS Data Quality allows users to profile their data to understand its content, structure, and quality. It includes automated early-warning systems that flag data that falls outside predefined tolerance levels, ensuring continuous monitoring and maintenance of data health.
- Data Standardization and Improvement: The solution enables the standardization, deduplication, and correction of data. It supports data standardization, matching, and monitoring across various data sources, including traditional IT infrastructure and Hadoop environments.
- Entity Resolution: Using advanced fuzzy-matching technology, SAS Data Quality helps identify individuals or entities across multiple data sources, even when relationships are incomplete or non-obvious. This feature includes cross-field matching, multirecord clustering, and confidence scoring to determine potential connections between records.
- Data Integration: The product integrates data quality into extract, transform, and load (ETL) and extract, load, and transform (ELT) activities. It supports data migration, standardizes formatting differences, and coordinates the execution of data integration and data quality jobs using visual process orchestration.
- Master Data Management: SAS Data Quality includes a master data management foundation that helps propagate high-quality data to an MDM hub, ensuring accurate master data records. It also manages reference data from multiple sources, integrating accurate and reliable reference data and maintaining data change management in a single interface.
- Business Glossary and Lineage: The patented SAS Business Data Network provides a web-based interface for business and IT teams to collaborate on creating and managing business terms, relationships, and technical metadata. This ensures comprehensive and consistent data management practices.
Key Features
- Centralized Platform: The solution offers a centralized platform that allows both business and IT users to collaborate on defining business rules, data definitions, and data standards. This ensures that data remains current, consistent, and reliable.
- Validation and Integrity Controls: SAS Data Quality includes validation and integrity controls, audit trails, security measures, and lineage information to build a foundation of trust for all business initiatives.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Available in both desktop and server environments, the solution allows users to start small and grow as their needs change, making it adaptable to evolving business requirements.
- Cost and Risk Mitigation: By reducing or eliminating costs associated with duplicate or incorrect data storage and administration, SAS Data Quality helps mitigate risks and lower overall costs related to data management. It also minimizes licensing, integration, maintenance, training, and support costs through a consolidated portfolio of capabilities from a single vendor.
Benefits
- Accurate Decision-Making: SAS Data Quality enables organizations to make faster, accurate decisions by providing a complete, accurate, and unified view of their data. This is achieved through a common, shared interface where IT and business users can collaborate.
- Operational Efficiency: The solution frees IT from repetitive maintenance tasks by allowing the reuse of data integration and data quality jobs and workflows. It also provides a point-and-click interface for visually exploring data for quality issues and creating workflows.
- Comprehensive Data Management: By integrating data quality into various business processes, SAS Data Quality helps organizations build a solid foundation of high-quality data, which is essential for driving successful business initiatives, customer relations, sales, production, and compliance.
In summary, SAS Data Quality is an essential tool for any organization seeking to improve the accuracy, reliability, and consistency of their data. It offers a wide range of features and functionalities that support the entire data quality life cycle, from profiling and standardization to monitoring and master data management.