Processing a Duplicate Match: An Example

 

The following is an example of the steps you would take to merge two records together, as outlined in the section Processing Duplicates: Four Steps to Follow.  Included at the end are the outputs from the Export Data window for this merge.

 

STEP 1: Determine if it’s a true duplicate

In this example, we can see a customer called “Daniel H Fulton” exists in the database twice.  It is not a False Duplicate, so we would not click the Ignore link – simply move onto Step 2.

 

 

STEP 2: Select the record you want to keep

In this step we determine which record contains a more complete set of data and select that record as the record to keep.  In this example let’s decide to keep record 2812. 

To do this we need to make it the master record by clicking on the customer ID 2812.  This moves this record into the master position (on the left) so we know this is the record we want to keep.

 

 

STEP 3: Make any ‘Copy-over’ and Manual Edits

Now you want to copy across any data you don’t want to lose from the slave record into the master.  The red highlighting of cells (which contain data that will be lost) are the cells you want to compare between the master and the slave:

 

You might also want to make manual edits in the master record before the merge takes place.  You can do this by clicking in the cell you want to edit and directly editing that value:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STEP 4: Merge the records together

We are now ready to merge the records together by pressing Merge.  This will make any automatic field merges (the green fields in the slave record) and then delete the slave record.

 

 

 Results of the Merge

 

We can review the changes recorded as part of this merge by looking at the Edits & Merges Report in the export window.  This section in the report outlines all the edits and deletes that make up the merge we have just processed:

 

 

We can also get these changes as a list of T-SQL scripts:

--Merge 1391 into 2812

UPDATE Customers SET LastName='H Fulton' WHERE CustomerID=2812

UPDATE Customers SET PhoneNumber='770-004-2896 Extn: 802' WHERE CustomerID=2812

UPDATE Customers SET TotalSalesThisYear=12379.00000000 WHERE CustomerID=2812

UPDATE Customers SET CustomerStatus='A++' WHERE CustomerID=2812

DELETE FROM Customers WHERE CustomerID=1391

 

 

We can also get them in XML:

- <<Merge KeepPrimaryKey="2812" DeletePrimaryKey="1391" SimilarityIndex="0.8354" IsAutoMerge="False">

  <    <Edit OriginalFieldName="LastName" FriendlyFieldName="LastName" UpdateToValue="H Fulton" RecordPrimaryKey="2812" />

  <    <Edit OriginalFieldName="PhoneNumber" FriendlyFieldName="PhoneNumber" UpdateToValue="770-004-2896 Extn: 802" RecordPrimaryKey="2812" />

  <    <Edit OriginalFieldName="TotalSalesThisYear" FriendlyFieldName="TotalSalesThisYear" UpdateToValue="12379.00000000" RecordPrimaryKey="2812" />

  <    <Edit OriginalFieldName="CustomerStatus" FriendlyFieldName="CustomerStatus" UpdateToValue="A++" RecordPrimaryKey="2812" />

  </Merge>

 

 

And we can also export the final cleaned data as either CSV, XLS or XML:

 

Related Topics

Processing Tool