Detecting duplicate records in databases

The invention concerns a detection of duplicate tuples in a database. Previous domain independent detection of duplicated tuples relied on standard similarity functions (e.g., edit distance, cosine metric) between multi-attribute tuples. However, such prior art approaches result in large numbers of false positives if they are used to identify domain-specific abbreviations and conventions. In accordance with the invention a process for duplicate detection is implemented based on interpreting records from multiple dimensional tables in a data warehouse, which are associated with hierarchies specified through key-foreign key relationships in a snowflake schema. The invention exploits the extra knowledge available from the table hierarchy to develop a high quality, scalable duplicate detection process.