Unlocking Confidence in Unstructured Data: Addressing Top Challenges in the Data Lake Ecosystem

As organizations expand their digital transformation efforts, they increasingly rely on data lakes for unstructured data storage and analysis. Unstructured data text files, XMLs, raw logs doesn’t fit into traditional data structures, making it complex to manage and validate within a data lake. In response to the growing demand for reliable data insights, ensuring the accuracy of unstructured data has become critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Without reliable data, your organization can be susceptible to compliance fines, migration or transformation failures, and biased AI/ML projects.

Understanding the Key Challenges of Unstructured Data in Data Lakes

Unstructured data lacks a predefined format, which introduces unique challenges in maintaining data quality and consistency. Here are some of the most common issues:

Data Source Inconsistencies: With multiple data sources feeding into a data lake, keeping the structure uniform is a constant battle. When each source has a different data structure or format, creating a cohesive view of the data landscape becomes nearly impossible.

Lack of Metadata: Unstructured data often comes without the metadata needed to organize, classify, and retrieve information efficiently. Without these essential descriptors, data lakes can quickly turn into “data swamps,” making it challenging to derive actionable insights.

Resource Constraints in Data Quality Management: According to the O’Reilly State of Data Quality Report, many organizations struggle to maintain data quality due to limited resources. Testing unstructured data manually is time-consuming and prone to error, underscoring the need for automation to ensure quality at scale.

The Value of Automated Data Quality Solutions

Automating data quality processes offers a strategic solution to overcome these challenges. Tricentis Data Integrity (DI) provides a powerful approach to data validation across complex data pipelines. Here’s how Data Integrity addresses the common challenges of unstructured data:

Pre-Ingestion Checks and Continuous Monitoring: Data Integrity performs comprehensive checks—such as metadata completeness and data integrity—before ingestion to ensure data is ready for use. It also offers continuous monitoring through crucial validations like row counts, data distribution, and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) verification as data moves through the pipeline.

Field and Reconciliation Testing: Data Integrity checks data fields for consistency in values, range, and transformation while running source-to-target comparisons to ensure accuracy across the board.

Time and Cost Efficiency: By automating these tasks, Data Integrity enables organizations to reach up to 90% automation, significantly reducing the QA cycle and associated costs.

Case Study: Automation in Action

Narwal has successfully leveraged Data Integrity to automate validation for unstructured data from both mainframe files and XML sources. Here’s how automation helped streamline two complex scenarios:

Validating Mainframe Data in Azure Databricks: Mainframe files, often unstructured and difficult to process, present a challenge when validating against modern cloud databases like Azure Databricks. With Data Integrity, Narwal was able to automate this process from start to finish, eliminating the need for manual intervention and transforming validation into a quick, reliable daily task.

XML File Validation in Impala: With over 400 variations of XML files, manual validation would have been an unfeasible, resource-intensive effort. By automating the process with Data Integrity, Narwal could load XML data into a caching database, format it correctly, and conduct automated validation—turning an otherwise monumental task into a scheduled, hands-off process.

Achieving Business Confidence with Data Quality Automation

For organizations looking to enhance their decision-making capabilities, unstructured data quality is paramount. Tricentis Data Integrity has been instrumental in achieving higher accuracy, reduced cycles, and lower costs, as demonstrated by Narwal’s success stories. These outcomes highlight the value of automated solutions that address data complexity while ensuring integrity every step of the way. Tricentis Data Integrity has become more than a testing tool, it is a risk mitigation tool.

By adopting an automated approach to unstructured data validation, organizations can move confidently toward digital transformation. Reliable data quality not only accelerates business processes but also provides the foundation for strategic, data-driven decisions, making it essential for staying competitive in today’s data-driven landscape.

Want to dive deeper into how automation can solve the toughest challenges in BI reporting? Don’t miss our upcoming exclusive webinar in collaboration with Tricentis, where we’ll unpack real-world strategies to eliminate costly data errors across modern data lakes. Whether you’re managing mainframe migrations, XML validations, or complex ETL pipelines—this session will equip you to move from reactive fixes to proactive data quality assurance.

Register now for the webinar – Automating Data Quality: How to Prevent Costly BI Reporting Errors
Date: May 7, 2025 | Time: 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM EST

References:

O’Reilly. The State of Data Quality Report. Available at: https://www.oreilly.com/data/

(Cited for resource constraints and data quality management statistics)

MIT Sloan Management Review. “The Cost of Bad Data.” Available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/ (Referenced in the context of the financial impact of poor data quality on organizations)

Tricentis. “Tricentis Tosca Data Integrity: Automated Testing for Data Quality.” Available at: https://www.tricentis.com/ (Source for the features and functionalities of Data Integrity in data validation)

Narwal Case Studies. Automated Unstructured Data Validation for Enterprise Data Lakes. Narwal Inc. Available at: https://www.narwalinc.com/ (Used for case study references on automating mainframe and XML data validation)