IDQ Review
March 10, 2014
IDQ Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
9.0
Overall Satisfaction
In our organization that I was at, IDQ was being used only by a single department. We used IDQ to first help us standardize customer addresses and then eventually started using the matching capabilities to find duplicate records within our database. Before this product we used SQL statemtns to standardize data and find duplicates.
By using IDQ, it greatly reduced the time and effort to perform the above mentioned items.
By using IDQ, it greatly reduced the time and effort to perform the above mentioned items.
- The matching algorithms in IDQ are very powerful if you understand the different types that they offer (e.g., Hamming Distance, Jaro, Bigram, etc..). We had to play around with it to see which best suit our own needs of identifying and eliminating duplicate customers. Setting up the whole process (e.g., creating the KeyGenerator Transformation, setting up the matching threshold, etc..) can be somewhat time consuming and a challenge if you don't first standardize your data.
- The integration with PowerCenter is great if you have both. You can either import your mappings directly to PowerCenter or to an XML file. The only downside is that some of the transformations are unique to IDQ, so you are not really able to edit them once in PowerCenter.
- The standardizer transformation was key in helping us standardize our customer data (e.g., names, addresses, etc..). It was helpful due to having create a reference table containing the standardized value and the associated unstandardized values. What was great was that if you used Informatica Analyst, a business analyst could login and correct any of the values.
- I wish some of the functionality was combined with PowerCenter, especially being able to create workflows, etc. and schdeuling them.
- IDQ has greatly helped us improve our customer service. Before, we would have one person duplicated many times in the database. So their transactions wouldn't always be there since it could have gone to one of the duplicate records.
- By standardizing the customers addresses, it helped reduce the cost of getting invalid addresses back. Address doctor can help and identify incorrect address and helped our organization fix and correct it.
- Efficiency was improved greatly because we did not have to manually go through and identify records and fix them. Now there's an automated way of doing it and thus saved us time to focus on other things.