AWS launches visual data preparation tool DataBrew

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its new visual data preparation tool that lets users clean and normalise data without having to write code.

Built as part of its AWS Glue service, the new DataBrew tool aims to make visual data preparation more accessible for a greater number of users.

According to AWS, DataBrew facilitates data exploration and experimentation directly from AWS data lakes, data warehouses, and databases. Its users will be able to choose from over 250 built-in functions to combine, pivot, and transpose the data, with the tool also providing transformations that use advanced machine learning techniques such as natural language processing.

DataBrew is serverless and fully-managed, the claim being that users will never need to configure, provision, or manage any compute resources directly.

“AWS customers are using data for analytics and machine learning at an unprecedented pace”, commented Raju Gulabani, AWS vice president of Database and Analytics. “However, these customers regularly tell us that their teams spend too much time on the undifferentiated, repetitive, and mundane tasks associated with data preparation. Customers love the scalability and flexibility of code-based data preparation services like AWS Glue, but they could also benefit from allowing business users, data analysts, and data scientists to visually explore and experiment with data independently, without writing code.

"AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data,” he added.

AWS Glue DataBrew is generally available starting today in Ireland and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as select parts of the United States, including Ohio and Oregon, and the Asia Pacific Region. AWS said that it will announce the availability in additional regions “soon” but has yet to confirm when the tool will arrive in the UK.

When it comes to pricing, AWS said that the DataBrew users will not be faced with any “upfront commitments or costs” to use the tool, but will be expected to pay for the ability to create and run transformations on datasets. AWS did not immediately respond to IT Pro’s query regarding specific pricing.