Consolidation & Output

Consolidation means combining a group of matched records into a single best record. You define how each field is chosen or combined, so the surviving record carries the best available value for every field - the most recent phone number, the most complete address, the preferred spelling of a name - no matter which duplicate it came from.

You don't have to discard everything in the duplicates you drop. With group posting (also called data salvage), Match IQ copies or accumulates the best data from matched records into the master before the duplicates are removed. This lets you enrich the surviving record - and even migrate useful data between files - without merging the records outright.

Match IQ can either write results to a new destination or update your source data in place, and it offers several output shapes for different goals:

• Best-record output - the unique records plus one master per match group. Ideal for a clean mailing list or master file.
• All-duplicates output - every record that matched at least one other, with no uniques. Useful for quality control and database maintenance.
• Multi-occurrence output - records grouped by how many times they occur, for multi-buyer and overlap analysis.
• Custom output - define your own combination of match sets and levels to output exactly what you need.

You can also choose between creating a new output file or database table and purging unwanted records from the input when disk space or in-place cleanup is the priority. Results can be written to files or SQL tables.

Beyond deduplication, Match IQ helps you select the right records for a given purpose. Using custom sorting and selection you can:

• Sort eligible records by any criteria and keep the best ones.
• Limit output to a maximum number of records, or select every Nth record.
• Limit output to a set number of contacts per company for business-to-business campaigns.

• Reference files - when you repeatedly match new data against the same static database, Match IQ can reuse previously generated match keys instead of rebuilding them every run, saving significant time.
• Stable group IDs - assign a persistent identifier to each record or duplicate group that doesn't change when records are updated or reprocessed. New records that join an existing group inherit that group's ID, so your deduplication stays consistent over time.