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If you’re looking for a data quality solution, you have many options. SAS Data Management and Talend Data Quality are two of the most popular solutions on the market today, both offering robust features that help you clean up your data and improve its accuracy.

SEE: Data governance checklist for your organization (TechRepublic Premium)

Which solution is best for your business’s data quality management needs? Evaluate SAS Data Management vs. Talend Data Quality in this head-to-head comparison guide.

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What is SAS Data Management?

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Image: SAS

SAS Data Management is a comprehensive data quality solution that offers many data cleansing, enrichment and transformation features. It also includes a data governance module to help you track and manage your data. SAS Data Management is available in both on-premises and cloud-based versions.

What is Talend Data Quality?

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Image: Talend

Talend Data Quality is a data quality solution that includes several features to help with data cleansing, integration, governance, profiling, standardization, matching, deduplication, and application and API integration. Talend Data Quality is part of the Talend Data Fabric suite, which also includes Talend Data Integration, Talend Data Management and Talend Big Data.

SAS Data Management vs. Talend Data Quality: Feature comparison

FeatureSAS Data ManagementTalend Data Quality
User-friendlyNoYes
Steep learning curveYesNo
Data profilingYesYes
Data cleansingYesYes
Data integrityYesYes
Data modification and standardizationYesYes
Automated and manual cleaningYesYes
Free trialYesYes

Head-to-head comparison: SAS Data Management vs Talend Data Quality

User-friendliness

User-friendliness is vital when business users are trying to decide which data quality solution to implement. No one wants to spend countless hours learning a system that is difficult to use.

Many users assert that the SAS Data Management interface is complex and the programming language is not intuitive. In addition, the guide materials are too technical. While you can do a lot with SAS, it does require some training and background knowledge of the tool’s procedures and their related steps.

SEE: Review the top data literacy training courses (TechRepublic)

On the other hand, Talend Data Quality is easier to learn and offers a more intuitive dashboard. Overall, Talend’s data quality solutions are much simpler to use and don’t require nearly as much time or training to use effectively. For these reasons, Talend Data Quality is the better choice for prospective buyers who are looking for a user-friendly data quality solution.

Data profiling and identifying data anomalies

Both brands offer robust capabilities to profile data and identify anomalies.

With SAS Data Management, users can validate data against standard measures and customized business rules, uncover relationships across tables and databases, and establish trends, commonalities and anomalies.

Talend’s Data Profiling solution allows users to improve data quality, discover patterns and find anomalies through summary statistics and graphs.

Data cleansing functionalities

SAS Data Management provides users with data cleansing tools like SAS DataFlux Data Preparation to merge, append and delete records. SAS DataFlux Data Preparation can also be used to standardize data.

On the other hand, Talend’s Data Preparation solution provides an easy-to-use, self-service, browser-based tool that helps you quickly identify errors and apply rules. You can easily reuse and share these rules across massive data sets.

While both data quality solutions offer users different ways to cleanse data, Talend Data Quality does a more effective job. The Talend Trust Score is a data quality solution that analyzes data sources and identifies data quality issues.

The solution provides a score indicating the level of trust you can place in the data, which is based on many factors, including data completeness, accuracy and consistency. Users can use the score to assess data quality from various sources, including databases, spreadsheets and text files. In addition, the solution can be used to evaluate the quality of data sets generated by data mining or data warehousing processes.

Data modification and standardization

Talend Data Quality offers data standardization based on predefined rules, while SAS Data Management uses a combination of parsing rules, standardization rules, phonetic matching and token-based weighting to make sure that source information is clear.

Automated and manual cleaning options

SAS Data Management and Talend Data Quality offer automated and manual data cleansing options.

SEE: Data cleansing: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)

SAS Data Management provides users with an interactive interface that guides users through the data cleansing process, while Talend Data Quality offers a graphical interface that allows users to visually see the data transformation process.

Data integrity

Both products offer a range of features to help you preserve data integrity, but there are a few differences between them.

SAS Data Management has a comprehensive approach to data security, with authorization and auditing tools that help reduce risk exposure.

Talend Data Quality, on the other hand, offers a unified approach to data integrity and governance. The Talend Data Fabric data integrity platform provides speed in data integration and trustworthy, accurate data through built-in data governance and data quality capabilities.

Choosing between SAS Data Management and Talend Data Quality

When choosing between SAS Data Management and Talend Data Quality, there are several factors to consider.

SEE: Top data quality tools (TechRepublic)

Talend Data Quality is the better choice if you need a data quality solution that is easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of training. On the other hand, if you need a data quality solution with more advanced, comprehensive features, SAS Data Management may be the better option, but you must be prepared to invest in training to get the most out of the SAS product.

In general, SAS Data Management is a better choice for large enterprises that need a comprehensive data quality solution, while Talend Data Quality is a better choice for small and medium-sized businesses that need an easy-to-use data quality solution. Ultimately, the decision comes down to your specific needs and requirements.

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