Best practices for data wrangling

There are many ways and tools available to perform data wrangling, depending on how data wrangling is performed and by whom. For example, if you are working on real-time use cases such as providing product recommendations or fraud detection, your choice of tool and process for performing data wrangling will be a lot different compared to when you are looking to build a business intelligence (BI) dashboard to show sales numbers.

Regardless of the kind of use cases you are looking to solve, some standard best practices can be applied in each case that will help make your job easier as a data wrangler.

Identifying the business use case

It’s recommended that you decide which service or tool you are looking to use for data wrangling before you write a single line of code. It is super important to identify the business use case as this will set the stage for data wrangling processes and make the job of identifying the services you are looking to use easier. For example, if you have a business use case such as analyzing HR data for small organizations where you just need to concatenate a few columns, remove a few columns, remove duplicates, remove NULL values, and so on from a small dataset that contains 10,000 records, and only a few users will be looking to access the wrangled data, then you don’t need to invest a ton of money to find a fancy data wrangling tool available on the market – you can simply use Excel sheets for your work.

However, when you have a business use case, such as processing claims data you receive from different partners where you need to work with semi-structured files such as JSON, or non-structured datasets such as XML files to extract only a few files’ data such as their claim ID and customer information, and you are looking to perform complex data wrangling processes such as joins, finding patterns using regex, and so on, then you should look to write scripts or subscribe to any enterprise-grade tool for your work.

Identifying the data source and bringing the right data

After identifying the business use case, it is important to identify which data sources are required to solve it. Identifying this source will help you choose what kind of services are required to bring the data, frequency, and end storage. For example, if you are looking to build a credit card fraud detection solution, you need to bring in credit card transaction data in real time; even cleaning and processing the data should be done in real time. Machine learning inference also needs to be run on real-time data.

Similarly, if you are building a sales dashboard, you may need to bring in data from a CRM system such as Salesforce or a transactional datastore such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and so on.

After identifying the right data sources, it is important to bring in the right data from these data sources as it will help you solve the business use cases and make the data wrangling process easy.

Identifying your audience

When you perform data wrangling, one important aspect is to identify your audience. Knowing your audience will help you identify what kind of data they are looking to consume. For example, marketing teams may have different data wrangling requirements compared to data science teams or business executives.

This will also give you an idea of where you are looking to present the data – for example, a data scientist team may need data in an object store such as Amazon S3, business analysts may need data in flat files such as CSV, BI developers may need data in a transactional data store, and business users may need data in applications.

With that, we have covered the best practices of data wrangling. Next, we will explore the different options that are available within AWS to perform data wrangling.