Detecting duplicate records in databases

• US 20050262044A1
• Filed: 07/14/2005
• Published: 11/24/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 06/28/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Chaudhuri, Surajit, Ganti, Venkatesh, Ananthakrishna, Rohit
• Granted Patent: US 7,685,090 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/215 Improving data quality; Data cleansing, e.g. de-duplication, removing invalid entries or correcting typographical errors
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99942 Manipulating data structure, e.g. compression, compaction, compilation

Abstract

The invention concerns a detection of duplicate tuples in a database. Previous domain independent detection of duplicated tuples relied on standard similarity functions (e.g., edit distance, cosine metric) between multi-attribute tuples. However, such prior art approaches result in large numbers of false positives if they are used to identify domain-specific abbreviations and conventions. In accordance with the invention a process for duplicate detection is implemented based on interpreting records from multiple dimensional tables in a data warehouse, which are associated with hierarchies specified through key-foreign key relationships in a snowflake schema. The invention exploits the extra knowledge available from the table hierarchy to develop a high quality, scalable duplicate detection process.

Claims

1. In a database having records stored on a medium, a method for identifying possible duplicate data records comprising:

a) providing multiple records in one or more tables that include multiple fields; and

b) identifying two or more records within a table as possible duplicates by measuring a co-occurence of data in two or more hierarchically related fields of the table.