Data Wrangling - is it so bad?

Clinton Jones
Clinton Jones Experian Elite
edited December 2023 in General

An interesting perspective from Pete Aven of Marklogic, popped up in my feed this week, written on Medium.com and enitled "Data Wrangling is Bad"; Aven describes how potentially we're all Data Wranglers, that it is not a good thing, should not be embraced or accepted. In reality though, do we have a choice?

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  • Henry Simms
    Henry Simms Administrator
    edited September 2019

    Interesting read. I think the article is right to call out the unrepeatable, ad-hoc munging that often goes on behind the scenes during report building as problematic.

    • The individual doing the wrangling makes a lot of assumptions about the data, how to map it and how to deal with inconsistencies. Without a documented workflow there's no transparency in this process
    • The lack of repeatability means the time wasted in wrangling isn't just a one-off, it's a weekly or monthly cost that accumulates
    • Manual processes are always error-prone

    It would be great to be able to track the hours spent doing this sort of repeated wrangling, and it would really help to strengthen the use-case for applications like Data Studio that allow business users without CS degrees to build transparent, repeatable workflows

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