I'm currently running SQL Server '05, an upgrade to '12 is in the works in the near future.
My current problem is this. I maintain a table which contains a list of 20K records of schools we currently do business with. We recently purchased a "database" (really just a gigantic excel spreadsheet) of 150+K schools. I'm looking for software, tools, or methods to help me merge our current information with the purchased information. Obviously we want to remove any duplicate entries (those school which currently exist in our live database).
However my issue is I can not for the life of me come up with any thing that produces a solid match between the two sets of data. If the names of the school were in a standardized format I would be have some solid ground to work with. However, you run into issues such as our DB has FooBar High School and the purchased DB has Foo Bar HS. Just a quick sort and visual comparison of the two datasets have shown that this is a common issue for us right now. I'd rather not have to comb through all this data by hand, but I'm coming up short on ideas to avoid that nightmare.
Hopefully someone out here may point me in the right direction? :)
My current problem is this. I maintain a table which contains a list of 20K records of schools we currently do business with. We recently purchased a "database" (really just a gigantic excel spreadsheet) of 150+K schools. I'm looking for software, tools, or methods to help me merge our current information with the purchased information. Obviously we want to remove any duplicate entries (those school which currently exist in our live database).
However my issue is I can not for the life of me come up with any thing that produces a solid match between the two sets of data. If the names of the school were in a standardized format I would be have some solid ground to work with. However, you run into issues such as our DB has FooBar High School and the purchased DB has Foo Bar HS. Just a quick sort and visual comparison of the two datasets have shown that this is a common issue for us right now. I'd rather not have to comb through all this data by hand, but I'm coming up short on ideas to avoid that nightmare.
Hopefully someone out here may point me in the right direction? :)