Single and two-sided processes have a theoretic maximum number of fields (reported and match) that can be used on a specific run. However, this limit varies as different data types take up a different amount of space. For example, text fields take more space than numeric fields. Generally up to 170 fields will pose no trouble.
If your data contains more than 170 fields, there are a few best practices to keep in mind that will not only allow you to use more fields, but also improve the matching performance:
- Do all the fields need to be of type “Text”? If many of your fields contain only numerical data then they can be converted to the “Decimal” or “Integer” type, which take less space. If they are dates then the “Date”, “Time” or “Date/Time” types can be used instead. Changing data types is performed from the Data Inputs settings page.
- Each “Text” field can support up to 128 characters. Thus if you have multiple textual columns where each contains only a few characters, you can consolidate them into a single field with the type “Text” (as long as the combined length does not exceed 128 characters). You can then use our Natural Rule Language (NRL) to extract subsets from the resultant string and assign these to different fields.