Re: How to extract single characters in PL/SQL?

This properly belongs in c.d.o.marketplace so forgive the plug, but you may like to check out IDentity Software. This is an Australian software firm focussing on the exact business problem you are facing. If you want to know more, here's a link:
http://ats.business.gov.au/aws/NSW_228/

Disclaimer: I have no commercial interest here, but I did go to university with the firm's founder. Good bloke.

Martin Doherty

Tim X wrote:

>noergl_at_gmx.net (Ludwig Nörg) writes:
>
>
>
>>thanx a lot for your postings - but 2 hours after my first posting I
>>found that solution you described by myself in the horrible Oracle 9
>>Online SQL Reference. So the instr() helps, but I am in the terrible
>>situation to split about 40 million customer data sets (input since
>>1973 ...) in totally 15 different occurrences :-(
>>
>>So it seems there should be a lot of manual post-editing if it doesn't
>>work ...
>>
>>
>
>Yuk! This is not going to be pleasant!
>
>It might be worth while doing a few tests on your data sets and
>possibly developing some heuristics which might help reduce the data
>set which will need to be handled differently/individually. Perhaps
>extracting those fields which have more than 2 "words" for example
>might help identify people with names like Van Dyk etc.
>
>I hope your 40M data set doesn't have lots of names from Asia, Middle
>East etc as this could make it even more difficult as there is a lot
>of variance in name structures and what is considered to be the family
>name etc.
>
>good luck,
>
>Tim
>
>
Received on Wed Dec 18 2002 - 01:46:44 CET