The first step in an online or batch process that has to find records about a person, organization or address is to get "candidates" from the database using the keys defined for the names or addresses. The "search strategy" used to achieve this goal must balance the conflicting objectives of making sure it does not miss possible candidates, yet at the same time not slow the process with too many irrelevant candidates. SSA-NAME3 provides a variety of "search strategies" or access paths to data using names or addresses as search keys.

Applications dealing with relatively reliable and complete data can use a high performance strategy, while applications dealing with less reliable data or with more critical problems need more complex strategies. For any name or address, SSA-NAME3 provides the business application with a logical access path to the set of records that are most likely to include relevant matching records. Out-of-thebox, four search strategies or "search levels" are provided. These are

Narrow

,

Typical

,

Exhaustive

and

Extreme

.

For example, an Exhaustive search for the name "John William Smith" may result in:

This figure is a diagrammatic example of a search strategy where all records containing two similar words are found, as well as the major word (in this case "Smith") together with explicitly only the initials well as a set of records that contain only the major word.