9 Essential Data Cleaning Tools

Data cleaning isn’t a “nice-to-have” step before analytics. It’s the step that decides whether your dashboards become trusted decision tools or expensive fiction. The market is full of data cleaning tools that promise to purity, but they don’t all measure up. And while there’s also quite a bit of overlap in what they do (clean data), they each offer unique skills and strengths in what they do and how they do it that make a true comparison that chooses the “best data cleaning tool” a fool’s errand. This means that the end result of your search for the perfect data cleaning tool for your organization is you may end up with tools – with a capital “S”– that complement one … Read more

Salesforce Informatica Acquisition: Fewer & Bigger

The Salesforce Informatica acquisition is yet another step toward a narrower field of bigger players. For most end users however, fewer & bigger ≠ better. This acquisition has been one of the most consequential enterprise software deals in recent years. Salesforce has now completed the aquisition of Informatica, the longtime heavyweight in data integration and management in annouced it was buying back in May. While on the surface this acquisition looked like a classic platform expansion play, underneath, it represents something larger and more fundamental in the way Salesforce sees itself, how we humans (and don’t forget the developers!) will be shaped by a narrowing field of data philosophies, each with ever-increasing power. That is, for developers and data engineers … Read more