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Data Profile Viewer

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Viewing and analyzing the data profiles is the next step in the data profiling process. You can view these profiles after you have run the Data Profiling task inside an Integration Services package and computed the data profiles. For more information about how to set up and run the Data Profiling tasks, see Setup of the Data Profiling Task.

Important

The output file might contain sensitive data about your database and the data that database contains. For suggestions on how to make this file more secure, see Access to Files Used by Packages.

Data Profiles

To view the data profiles, you configure the Data Profiling task to send its output to a file, and then you use the stand-alone Data Profile Viewer. To open the Data Profile Viewer, do one of the following.

  • Right-click the Data Profiling task in the SSIS Designer, and then click Edit. Click Open Profile Viewer on the General page of the Data Profiling Task Editor.

  • In the folder, <drive>:\Program Files (x86) | Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DTS\Binn, run DataProfileViewer.exe.

The viewer uses multiple panes to display the profiles that you requested and the computed results, with optional details and drilldown capability:

Profiles pane
The Profiles pane displays the profiles that were requested in the Data Profile task. To view the computed results for the profile, select the profile in the Profiles pane and the results will appear in the other panes of the viewer.

Results pane
The Results pane uses a single row to summarize the computed results of the profile. For example, if you request a Column Length Distribution Profile, this row includes the minimum and maximum length, and the row count. For most profiles, you can select this row in the Results pane to see additional detail in the optional Details pane.

Details pane
For most profile types, the Details pane displays additional information about the profile results selected in the Results pane. For example, if you request a Column Length Distribution Profile, the Details pane displays each column length that was found. The pane also displays the number and percentage of rows in which the column value has that column length.

For the three profile types that are computed against more than one column (Candidate Key, Functional Dependency, and Value Inclusion), the Details pane displays violations of the expected relationship. For example, if you request a Candidate Key Profile, the Details pane displays duplicate values that violate the uniqueness of the candidate key.

If the data source that is used to compute the profile is available, you can double-click a row in the Details pane to see the matching rows of data in the Drilldown pane.

Drilldown pane
You can double-click a row in the Details pane to see the matching rows of data in the Drilldown pane when the following conditions are true:

  • The data source that is used to compute the profile is available.

  • You have permission to view the data.

To connect to the source database for a drilldown request, the Data Profile Viewer uses Windows Authentication and the credentials of the current user. The Data Profile Viewer does not use the connection information that is stored in the package that ran the Data Profiling task.

Important

The drilldown capability that is available in the Data Profile Viewer sends live queries to the original data source. These queries may have a negative impact on the performance of the server.

If you drill down from an output file that was not created recently, the drilldown queries might return a different set of rows than those on which the original output was calculated.

For more information about the user interface of the Data Profile Viewer, see Data Profile Viewer F1 Help.