The performance, response time and ’number of records returned’ problems associated with name search relate, among other things, to the volume of data in the database and the skew of the distribution of names.

The reliability problems associated with name search relate, among other things, to the quality and make-up of the data being searched.

Normal test data cannot illustrate these volume & quality related problems. A name search system may pass design and acceptance testing but fail miserably in production for this reason. Therefore, all but the initial functional testing of name search applications should be carried out on Production data and production volumes. This also means that the data used to search with must also be appropriate for the production scenario. In other words, there is no benefit in tuning the Algorithms, Search Strategies and Matching Schemes to find Donald Duck, Micky Mouse (unless of course you are the Disney Corporation), XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX or

thisisthelongestnameIcancomeupwith

).

If the Production data is loaded into a development or test environment, care should be taken to not deduce ’production’ response times from these environments, as the production system environment may be very different. It may be possible to monitor the average number of records returned from a search and extrapolate the average record access time to the production scenario, but this requires some careful investigation.