The program Automatic deletion of duplicates (menu Reports - Misc. Programs) essentially carries out the same processes as the manual Search & merge function: it merges duplicate guest profiles, while retaining all statistical data. However, when running this program, any duplicate profiles will be merged automatically without the possibility of checking beforehand.
SIHOT identifies duplicate guest profiles according to the registry settings.
You can define two merge-runs with different parameters (registry keys [7463] and [7464]). For example, merge all guests with the same matchcode in the first run and in the second run, merge guests with identical addresses.
Which profile is to be kept and eventually contain the data of the merged duplicates, is determined by registry key [7467]. These keys contain the rules to be applied and their priority. See an example in section Manual search & merge.
Guest profiles that are flagged for deletion (field Delete = yes) will not be included in the search for duplicates.
The protocol (mergelog.txt) in the SIHOT path (directory log\mergelog) can be checked for information on the merged records.
NOTE:
Depending on the size of the database,
the search & merge program may take some time to run, as a large amounts of
data must be processed.
Ø To help reduce the processing time, enter a maximum number of records to be deleted in one go and/or select a guest type to be processed before running the program.