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Date Profiler

The Date Profiler analyzes a Date attribute, and shows the distribution of date values in that attribute in terms of:

Day of the week
Day of the month
Day of the year
Month
Year

A Valid/Null view is also included. Invalid dates are by definition Null, as any data value in a DATE attribute must be a valid date.

Use

Use the Date Profiler to see if there are any unusual trends in your Date attributes - for example to see if there is a default date such as 01/01/1970 that has commonly been used instead of a real date value.

Configuration

Inputs

A single Date attribute.

Options

None

Outputs

Data attributes

Data attribute	Type	Purpose	Possible Values
[Attribute Name].dayofweek	Added	Adds the day of week	Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
[Attribute Name].dayofmonth	Added	Adds the day of the month in a new attribute	1-31
[Attribute Name].dayofyear	Added	Adds the day of the year in a new attribute	1 Jan - 31st Dec
[Attribute Name].month	Added	Adds the month in a new attribute	January-December
[Attribute Name].year	Added	Adds the year in a new attribute	Any four-digit year

Note that splitting out the date values in the way above may be useful for downstream processing, for example, if you want to write out the data and perform matching based on the day, month and year values in separate attributes.

Flags

None

Execution

Execution Mode	Supported
Batch	Yes
Real time Monitoring	Yes
Real time Response	No

The Date Profiler looks for trends in batches of records with date values. It therefore requires a batch of records to produce its statistics. It must run to completion before its results are available, and is not suitable for a process that requires a real time response.

When executed against a batch of transactions from a real time data source, it will finish its processing when the commit point (transaction or time limit) configured on the Read Processor is reached.

Results Browsing

The Date Profiler produces a number of views on the date attribute it analyzes, each showing statistics as follows:

Day in Week view

Statistic	Meaning
Day in week	The day of the week (Sunday-Saturday)
Count	The number of records with dates that fell on that day of the week
%	The percentage of records with dates that fell on that day of the week

Day in Month view

Statistic	Meaning
Day in month	The day of the month (1-31)
Count	The number of records with dates that fell on that day of the month
%	The percentage of records with dates that fell on that day of the month

Day in Year view

Statistic	Meaning
Day in year	The day of the year (for example, 1st Jan)
Count	The number of records with dates that fell on that day of the year
%	The percentage of records with dates that fell on that day of the year

Month view

Statistic	Meaning
Month	The month (January - December)
Count	The number of records with dates that fell in that month
%	The percentage of records with dates that fell in that month

Year view

Statistic	Meaning
Year	The year
Count	The number of records with dates that fell in that year
%	The percentage of records with dates that fell in that year

Valid/Null view

Statistic	Meaning
Valid	The number of records with a valid date in the DATE attribute analyzed
Null	The number of records with a null value in the DATE attribute analyzed

Additional Information

Clicking on the Additional Information button from the Valid/Null view shows the statistics as percentages of the total number of records analyzed.

Example

In this example, the Date Profiler analyzes the distribution of dates in an attribute storing the date of the last payment made by a Customer. In this case, the user is most interested in the distribution of dates across years:

Year Summary