Re: inconsistent data within a column

Reggie Crawford wrote:

> Is there a quick and easy way to make data within a column consistent?
>
> For example, a company name could be represented 10 different ways in
> the column name field, so if I run a query looking for all customers
> from 'Hewlett-Packard', I miss the ones from 'HP' , 'Hewlett Packard',
> 'H.P.', and of course any misspellings. It would take me for ever to
> manually make this consistent.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Reggie

  Reggie,

In this case, if you don't have the database normalized to company name with a company name id (which would work if you had control over data input from day 1) you could use a free tool called dfROI, a data quality auditing tool that checks databases for data inconsistency, data redundancy/duplicate records etc.. It might be helpful too for examples other than the one you gave. It snaps right on top of Oracle (either with ODBC or natively) which makes it nice.

You can get it at http://www.dataflux.com/dfroi.htm

Hope that's helpful,

Denise Received on Thu Oct 22 1998 - 21:22:55 CDT