You can learn more about this on this course offered by Advocacy Assembly and School of Data. It is possible to get simple descriptive statistics of the dataset with most spreadsheet softwares: ● Descriptive Statistics with LibreOffice Calc ● Data profiling tools included with Microsoft Excel There are more questions that you will need to answer by carefully examining your source database, but also asking the team members who use the data regularly. The migration process is a great opportunity to better understand the source database and overcome its limitations with the new system. These are some additional questions you should answer: ● Is it possible to label each piece of data with its typology and format? Is there an identifiable format for dates, ID codes, names, etc.? Is it consistent along the dataset? ● What is the data structure? Is it possible to identify the type of objects represented in the dataset and the relations between them? Data mapping The target database needs to accommodate the data once it is cleaned and transformed. Data mapping determines how fields from the source and the target database will match, establishing a relationship between two or more data structures. This process includes the structure, the typology and the syntax rules that apply to the data in order to make connections between the source and the target databases. The example below shows a simple data mapping diagram in which several data stores from the source database are merged into a new container at the target database: 8