1Overview
Let's understand the concepts of duplicate identification and duplicate resolution.
Overview of Duplicate Identification
Duplicate identification is a process that identifies potential duplicate records for organization (account) and person (contact) records. You can use this process to identify duplicates in the following situations:
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Identify potential duplicate account and contact records in real-time when your salespeople create a customer record. This prevents the entry of duplicate records.
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Identify potential duplicates in batch mode for records already in the database or within the batch file itself.
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Identify duplicates during import of customer data for records already in the database or within the import batch file itself.
Duplicate identification uses the Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) service. You require a separate license for the Oracle Fusion Data Quality Cloud Service.
Overview of Duplicate Resolution
Duplicate resolution is a set of processes that you can use, after duplicate records are identified, to consolidate those records. You can resolve duplicates in two ways, either by linking them or by merging them. Linking involves associating the duplicate records.
The linked records are treated as unique records in the data registry, and have their own unique identifiers. Merging involves combining duplicate records into one new master record.
The duplicate resolution functionality comes with tools and rules that you can use to determine whether to merge records or not. These rules can also help determine the record that should be kept as the golden master (the surviving record) and the record that should be deleted (the non-master record).
You can setup linking by configuring a couple of profile options discussed in the topic Duplicate Resolution Simplified Profile Options. However, the setup for merging is a bit more elaborate. It consists of configuring logic to:
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Determine which record from a set of identified duplicates should be designated as the master record. You can set this up by configuring Set Master Record Rules.
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Determine which attribute value instances from across the set of duplicates the master record should have. You can set this up by configuring Set Attribute Value Rules. The Set Master Record Rules and Set Attribute Value Rules are collectively called Survivorship Rules.
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Determine whether the merge is violating any of the conditions under which a merge should be prohibited. You can set this up by configuring Agreement Rules.
You can easily setup survivorship and agreement rules in Application Composer using Groovy Script.
An alternative to using Groovy Scripts based survivorship and agreement rules is to configure them using Oracle Business Rules. You can do this configuration in the Setup and Maintenance work area using the Manage Survivorship Rules and Manage Agreement Rules setup tasks.
Note that if you're already using Oracle Business Rules, you can migrate from Oracle Business Rules to Groovy Script incrementally. For example, you could continue to use Oracle Business Rules to define agreement rules while using Groovy Script for your set master rules.