Data manipulation is the process of transforming, cleaning, and reorganizing data to make it more usable and meaningful for analysis, reporting, or other purposes. It involves operations like filtering, sorting, aggregating, and merging data.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of the process:

• Data Cleansing: Data manipulation helps identify and correct errors, inconsistencies, and missing values in data.
• Filtering: Selecting specific rows or columns based on certain criteria.
• Aggregating: Combining data into summary statistics.

Data manipulation and data modification are commonly used interchangeably. With respect to data processing, the two are mutually exclusive.

Data manipulation language, or DML, is a programming language that adjusts data by inserting, deleting and modifying data in a database such as to cleanse or map the data. SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a language that communicates with databases.