Hello! Our organization is looking into developing a stored procedure to match and merge some of our duplicates automatically. Have any of you ever done this before, or do you know anyone who has? I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't, and find an existing procedure to base ours off of.
Elise Bargman said:Our organization is looking into developing a stored procedure to match and merge some of our duplicates automatically.
Years ago, I recall Ken McSwain at the SOH created a process for that org that auto-merged records, saving all of the pre-merge data in a separate database, I think. A part of this suite included utilities that could un-merge records, too, since everything was saved. Very complex, and as far as I know, no-one else has set up anything that elaborate.
At the Guthrie, we did do some bulk merging in the weeks after we went live, at least 10-15K records iirc, identified with very strict matching rules and auto-categorized into Ks and Ds. We've use less strict rules ever since, and therefore checked all possible merges with human eyes before scheduling.
I recently caught up with staff at SOH and they have rewritten the auto script. Currently I am working at the Arts Centre Melbourne and we are currently investigating using a script to pick up very obvious merges for an auto-merge. Previously IT have run the script to merge files. This has very strict business rules which we are revisting now. This will of course be tested before utilising in PROD.