Matching and Merging Data

Underlying Data Enrichment is Edlink's ability to match and merge data from different sources. Here's a bit more about how that works and what options are available.

Merge Settings

There are 4 ways that data can be merged together in Edlink.

• Left Join - This is the default merge strategy. It will take all the data from the primary source and merge in any data from the secondary source that matches.
• Right Join - This is the opposite of a left join. It will take all the data from the secondary source and discard any unmatched data from the primary source.
• Inner Join - This will only keep data that is present in both the primary and secondary sources. The rest will be discarded.
• Full Join - This will keep all data from both the primary and secondary sources and match them together where possible.

While there doesn't need to be an explicit identifier between the primary and secondary source systems, there needs to be something that can help Edlink correlate the data between the two sources. This could be an email address, a student number, or even some form of partial ID. It's not necessary for all data to have common identifiers, but it is necessary for the data that you want to merge together (with some minor exceptions).

Here are some examples:

• SIS ID in the might roughly match email address in another systems (e.g. 12345 in the SIS might match 12345@school.edu in the LMS)
• Edlink can make adjustments for values that are prefixed or suffixed with a specific string (e.g. 12345 in the SIS might match T-12345 in the LMS)
• You can join two values together to create a match (e.g. School ID + SIS ID might match External ID in the LMS)

Field Level Settings

Field level merge settings can be adjusted if necessary, but you'll want to reach out to our support team to get this done. For example, by default, if a value is present in the "primary" source, it will not be overwritten by a value in the secondary source. This can be changed if necessary (but it's pretty unusual).

Getting Data Matched & Merged

Setting up data enrichment is a tricky process no matter how good Edlink gets. Please reach out to our support team if you need help getting your data matched and ready to share with companies. We're here to help!