Profiling is one of the major components in Delphix masking. The purpose of profiling data is to determine what data you want to mask by updating an inventory of your data with sensitive data elements identified. You can then review and edit that inventory.
A profiling job updates or populates an inventory of your data and identifies potentially sensitive data elements based on the profiling set (rule sets) you use. When you defined a rule set, the masking engine automatically created an empty inventory. When you examine your inventory, you might determine that you only want to select certain columns to mask, to finalize your inventory.
The Delphix profiler uses two different methods to identify the location of sensitive data:
- Searching through the column names in the target database by querying the database catalog (metadata).
- Looking at the data itself using a sampling algorithm, to see whether there is any sensitive data. This is especially useful for files, and for comment and notes fields in a database.
If you are using a source file instead of a source database, you can choose to populate your inventory manually or use the Delphix Masking Profiling module to profile your data. Because profiling assigns algorithm information to fields or columns, you might prefer not to profile your data if you would rather manually assign these properties. If you choose not to profile your data, skip this section.