Suggestions for matching proper names across databases

Question

Is there a guide to dealing with proper names in database settings. I have 2 data sets with proper names as primary keys but there are very big differences in formatting across the two sets. In addition, it's hard to even determine first, middle and last names due to various family names styles and hyphenation.

It's bad enough that I'm debating recreating the data from scratch but don't know what a good set of best practices is for dealing with names (ie should I use first, middle, last or merge middle with last, etc.)?

Any suggestions would be great for my sanity. Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes - the guide is. Don't do it. You can simply create a UNIQUE column making the name + new unique id column as unique, keep in mind this is not necessary global, it depends on your environment.

Otherwise you would want to use something like name + zip + dob +/- unique id.

This would give you a much better roundabout when dealing with these tables. ALSO if this is a project you walked into, you might want to consider bringing up a database design issue with your supervisor. As this is not good practice...