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Data Matching

The SDQ Universal Connector and the SDQ Matching Server support data matching on the Account, Contact, and List Mgmt Prospective Contact business components. For each type of record, data matching is performed for fields that are specified in user properties for the business component. These user properties specify the mapping between the Siebel field names and the vendor field names. For information about the preconfigured field mappings for SSA, see Preconfigured SSA Field Mappings, and for Firstlogic, see Preconfigured Field Mappings.

SDQ performs matching for some fields, for example, addresses, that have multi-value group (MVG) associations, however, SDQ does not match on MVGs. Therefore when performing matching for a contact, SDQ checks only the primary address for each contact record and does not consider other addresses.

In real-time data matching, whenever an account, contact, or prospect record is committed to the database, a request is automatically submitted to the Deduplication business service. The business service communicates with third-party data quality software, which checks for possible matches to the newly committed record and reports the results to the Siebel application.

In batch mode data matching, you first start a server task to generate or refresh the keys, and then start another server task to perform data matching. For information about performing batch mode data matching, see Matching Data Using Batch Jobs.

The following is the overall sequence of events in data matching:

1. Match keys are generated for database records for which data matching is enabled.
2. When a user enters or modifies a record in real-time mode, or the administrator submits a batch data matching job:
   1. A request is automatically submitted to the Deduplication business service.
   2. Using match keys, candidate matches are identified for each record. This is a means of filtering the potential matching records.
   3. The Deduplication business service sends the candidate records to the third-party software.
   4. The third-party software evaluates the candidate records and calculates a match score for each candidate record to identify the duplicate records.
   5. The third-party software returns the duplicate records to the Siebel application.
3. The duplicate records are displayed either in a pop-up window for real-time mode, or in the Administration - Data Quality views, from which you can manually merge records into a single record.

The follows topics describe the steps in this sequence in detail.