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Data Matching

The Universal Connector and Matching Server supports data matching on the Account, Contact, and List Mgmt Prospective Contact business components. For each type of record, data matching is performed for the current record against all other records of the same type, and with the same match keys, in the application using the fields specified in the Third Party Administration view. The mapping between the Siebel application field names and the vendor field names is defined for each business component. For more information about preconfigured field mappings, see Examples of Parameter and Field Mapping Values for Universal Connector.

Data quality performs matching using fields, for example, addresses, that can have multi-value group (MVG) values associated with the type of record being matched. However, data quality is not currently able to match using MVGs. Therefore, when performing matching for a contact, data quality 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.

In both real-time and batch mode, whenever a primary address is updated for an account or contact record, match keys are regenerated and data matching is performed for that account or contact.

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 window for real-time mode, or in the Administration - Data Quality views, from which you can manually merge records into a single record.

NOTE:  If using the Oracle Data Quality Matching Server for data matching, then you carry out deduplication against either the primary address or all address entities depending on configuration. For more information about deduplication against multiple addresses, see Configuring Deduplication Against Multiple Addresses.