Millions of client information that can not be uniquely identified

Hi

Every client of an organization at which i'm employed can not be uniquely identified. In this organization 30 milions of clients per year are registered. From every client a birthname, adres, birthdate, etc is registered. In theory it's possible that double customers occur (and possibly not the same).

In my proposal i suggested that for every registration a customer is inserted into a customer dimension. So for every fact record a dimensionrecord is inserted. Of course analysis is not possible but the system is used to query on a name to see whether it occurs and how much. Operators should gather these registrations and do some manual interpretation with this information. Trying to undouble this information is faulty and when a new field is added to this dimension will give troubles because i could appear that a customer is unique on n field but not n+1 fields.

Any suggestions for a better solution?

Regards,
Hennie7863

Is this a website? Is there repeated business with these clients? What is the purpose and ultimate business value of the data warehouse?

Thing is, if the data you are getting is garbage, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Try to work with what you got, but at the same time, investigate what can be done at the source to make the data more useful.

This is a public organisation which registers loans, debts and others. When a customer recieves a loan it will be registered at this organisation. Before a loan is given a customer is verified first at this organisation. For every message going in and out (XML) to and from this organisation a logrecord is created.

Thanks for your reply. I wasn't hopeful in advance.

Greetz,
Hennie

If you can't uniquely identify a customer, then you can't really have a customer dimension. Any metrics at the customer level will be incorrect. If that's OK, and sometimes it is go ahead and create the customer dimension. If it's not, and most of the time it isn't, remove the customer dimension.