On Mar 10, 2011, at 3:48 PM, fork wrote:
[much thoughtfulness]
> Steve Atkins <steve <at> blighty.com> writes:
> [also much thoughtfulness]
Steve and fork -- thank you, this is super helpful. I meant to tweak
that exact search before sending this around, sorry if that was
confusing. That was meant to be a place holder for [some set of
matches that works]. And yes, "not converging" was incorrect, I did
mean "not finishing." But together from your answers it sounds pretty
clear that there's no particularly obvious easy solution that I'm
missing; this really is kind of tricky. This is a choice between
developing some in-house capacity for this and sending people to
various vendors so we'll probably lean on the vendors for now, at
least while we work on it. I've gotten my head partway around PL/PGSQL
functions, I may give that another try.
And you're right fork, Record Linkage is in fact an entire academic
discipline! I had no idea, this is fascinating and helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage
Thanks so much!
Dan