matching and merging records into one record

  • Thread starter Thread starter James Inks
  • Start date Start date
J

James Inks

We had just completed a project to merge 3 seperate Access
databases together and were successful.

The problem is:
Now we have multiple duplicate / similar entries for a
single customer or address.

Questiion: Is there a way to "match and merge" these
entries into one record for this new single database.

Thanks
 
I am assuming you know how to identify duplicates. If not, ask.

However, I suspect, it is not a case of exact duplicates.
two customers may have two different IDs from the two databases
the address may be just a little different - Humans may be able to say they
are the same, but data-wise they are different.

Then there is the problem of foreign keys - rolling down the changes to all
those activity tables where the customer IDs are referenced...

This is not an easy task.
First set up a clean list of customers and add a newID column
Then take your existing customer List and add a newid column and manually
correlate one record in the new table
Create a list of tables/columns which need to be updated with the new ID
Finally, update the customer list , removing duplicate entries.
then update all activity tables in one fell swoop.

Regards
Habib
 
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