Before performing any profiling, be sure that your administrator has set up the site profiles according to the Masking Engine Admin Guide.
After selecting tables (connectors) and defining a rule set, which you did in the preceding sections, you create a profiling job. The purpose of profiling data is to determine what data you want to mask by updating an inventory of your data with sensitive elements identified. You can then review and edit that inventory.
If you are using a source file instead of a source database, you can choose to either populate your inventory manually or use profiling 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.
You can mask data on-the-fly or you can provision the data (using Delphix Masking or other tools) and then mask it (in-place masking). For a mainframe environment, the masking engine generates code for provisioning and masking on the mainframe system.
When you defined a rule set, an empty inventory was automatically created.)\ A profiling job updates or populates an inventory of your data and identifies potential sensitive data elements based on the profiling set (rule sets) you use. When you examine your inventory, you might determine that you only want to select certain columns to mask, to finalize your inventory. For information about the inventory, see Managing the Masking Inventory.
Profiling Data
- Create a profiling job as described in Creating a New Profiling Job.
- Run the profiling job you just created.
When you run this profiling job, it updates/populates an inventory. - To view the inventory, click the Inventory tab while in an Environment Overview.
- Examine the inventory to ensure that the profiling job has included everything you want to mask. For example, if you selected a First Name field, you probably want the Last Name field as well.
To see which columns were selected for masking, select the associated rule set.
Make sure you have included all sensitive data elements (for example, personal identifying information) from the table that you want to mask. If necessary, modify the inventory.
When a profiling job runs, it automatically updates the inventory for the given rule set. If you do not want the Profiler to automatically update the inventory, change the ID Method to User. For detailed information about profiling data, see Profiling Data.
What you do next depends on how you plan to mask your data. If you plan to mask your data in-place and you want to use Delphix Masking to provision your data, proceed with Provision Data next. If you plan to mask data on-the-fly, or have already provisioned your data outside of Delphix Masking, continue with Mask Data.