Importing New Constituents - Duplicate finding in RE 7.93

Owen Gibson

Hi All

 

Just wanted to ask people for their experiences when importing new constituents into their existing RE 7.93 data with regards to duplicate detection. I have a file of 2,000 individuals to import into an existing data set of 100,000 and just wondering if any one has any experiences to share, or advice to give. We don't have Import-o-Matic, would this help?

 Kind Regards

 

Owen

Melissa Graves 2

Owen Gibson:

Hi All

 

Just wanted to ask people for their experiences when importing new constituents into their existing RE 7.93 data with regards to duplicate detection. I have a file of 2,000 individuals to import into an existing data set of 100,000 and just wondering if any one has any experiences to share, or advice to give. We don't have Import-o-Matic, would this help?

 Kind Regards

 

Owen

Import-O-Matic would definitely help but it may be overkill for a single file of 2,000 records. It is quite expensive and unless you do these imports on a regular basis throughout the year, it would probably be difficult to justify the cost.

You are calling these "new constituents" yet you are worried about duplicates. So it sounds like you are not sure if they are all new. The duplicate algorythm is not bad in 7.92-3. The difficulty will be when you import as new constituents and it finds a duplicate it is simply rejected and you have to then take the reject file and make a new import from it which will "update" your existing constituents (assuming there is new data in the file).

Words of advice:

• Always make a backup before doing an import and do it when no one is in the system (early morning or late evening). This way if things go bad you can revert to the backup without losing anyones work.
• Test the import with a file of just a few records, then again with a slightly larger file, then with the entire file if things seem to be working.

Good Luck.