Automatically unmerge entity records
Learn about use cases for automatically unmerging entity records.
Are you a data steward or technical leader who is in charge of managing and analyzing your organization's data consolidation? If you often find yourself manually unmerging consolidated entity records, then this topic is for you!
When can't you use automatic unmerge?
- When you are using options for contributors or data providers in the data loading processes, also known as merge-on-the-fly by crosswalk
- When you are using Reltio Integration for Salesforce or Reltio Enrichment with D&B with a third-party Data Tenant Subscription Service (DTSS).
When can automatic unmerge help?
- When an attribute value is updated on its source data crosswalk. Imagine a first name attribute – involved in match rules – changes from "John" to "Jack", causing a contributing profile to no longer match. You can see, below, an example for the default setting — unmerge not enabled, for all entity types. Under this setting, you are limited to manual unmerge actions.
By enabling
unmergeat theEntityTypeslevel you can have profiles that no longer match, automatically unmerged, without requiring your time and attention.Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) events drive Automatic unmerge actions. These actions happen in near real-time as attributes are changed on contributing source crosswalks.
You can decide, on a case-by-case basis, which entity types to enable
unmergefor, based on your specific needs. - When you need to change an automatic match rule or update survivorship strategies, causing some profiles to no longer be a match.
In these situations, things are a bit different from what we talked about in the previous point. Instead of automatic unmerge happening on-the-fly, you'll need to execute BatchUnmergeEntities, see topic Automatic Unmerge Task.
When you execute this API, you'll only impact those entity types for which you've enabled
unmerge.
Consolidated profiles in automatic unmerge
As explained above, the automatic unmerge feature evaluates profiles when there are changes to the source attributes or there is a change in the match rule.
The unmerge process also evaluates multiple crosswalks belonging to the same data source, and will unmerge the records if they no longer a match. This also includes crosswalks from third-party enrichment systems. If you want to ignore certain crosswalks from being unmerged, you can list the crosswalks under the retainMergeConditions section of the Automatic unmerge feature configuration.
Under the retainMergeConditions section, you can also specify the automatic match rules (with scope=None) that you want to ignore during the automatic merge. Here's an example of why we would want to ignore match rules. Let us assume that two records with the same name, address, and phone number are merged. The phone number is updated, due to which the records are automatically unmerged. But another source system updates the phone number back to the original value, so the records are merged again as a result of automatic match rules. To avoid this scenario, create a new automatic rule setting the scope as NONE, adding only the name and address as a matching criteria. Add this rule under the retainMergeConditions section. This avoids the unmerging and merging of records again.
Manual merges are not considered during this process. Entities that are merged either using merge APIs, or manually merged by a data steward are not unmerged automatically. However, if you want to include manual merges during this process, you can configure the automatic unmerge feature to include it.
-
Underlying profiles are not found to be a match during evaluation using automatic match rules. Note: If the merged records satisfy at least one of the automatic match rules, they remain consolidated.
-
The
retainManualMergesparameter is set tofalseand the profiles were merged manually. For more information about theretainManualMergesconfiguration, see topic Enable automatic unmerge on the tenant configuration.
- They are solely composed by Reltio related data sources (e.g., Reltio, Reltio Data Cleanser, Reltio Pattern Cleanser).
- Their data source is the same. The system interprets them as singleton profiles.
- The
retainMergeConditions.matchGroupscontains a rule and the profiles are merged based on one of the listed rules. - One of the records in the consolidated profile belongs to a source listed under
retainMergeConditions.sources.
Examples - Automatic Unmerge
To help you visualize what happens under the hood when you enable this feature for an EntityType, we'll lay out three examples:
- Entity 1 (E1) is automatically merged with entity 2 (E2).
- Information on the merge is written to the merge tree.
- Contributing entities are listed in the surviving entity.
- Attribute
FirstName, from E1, is updated on its source data crosswalk. - In-memory testing detects E1 and E2 no longer match (CRUD event).
- E1 is automatically unmerged from E2.
- E1 is already automatically merged with E2.
- E3 is merged with surviving E1.
- Information on the merge is written to the merge tree.
- Contributing entities are listed in the surviving entity.
- Attribute
FirstName, from E3, is updated on its source data crosswalk. - In-memory testing detects E3 and E1 no longer match (CRUD event).
- E3 is automatically unmerged from E1.
- E2 remains merged to surviving E1.
- E1 is already automatically merged with E2.
- E3 is merged with surviving E1.
- Information on the merge is written to the merge tree.
- Contributing entities are listed in the surviving entity.
- Attribute
FirstName, from E2, is updated on its source data crosswalk. - In-memory testing detects E2 and E1 no longer match (CRUD event).
- E2 is automatically unmerged from E1.
- Surviving E1 now contains exclusively E3 in its merge tree (at the beginning of this example, E1 contained exclusively E2 in its merge tree).