Gender of Names

Does anyone know of a way to identify the gender of a person's name in a table? I have found an application that does it but I have to export it and use another program to analyze the data and then importing it back into SQL. We have a table that has a list of customers names that we use to market and we need this tool to analzye the customers by gender.

Thank you in advance for your help.

xroadtripx wrote:

Does anyone know of a way to identify the gender of a person's name in a table? I have found an application that does it but I have to export it and use another program to analyze the data and then importing it back into SQL. We have a table that has a list of customers names that we use to market and we need this tool to analyze the customers by gender.

There's nothing inherent in SQL Server to estimate the gender of a name for a given language.

Probably the most common method is simply a look-up, into a table to names and gender association or probability. There's a few gender tables on the Web if that's the approach you want to take.

Besides a straight look-up, there name analysis based on language and statistics--which really just breaks a name into several look-ups to account for "unseen" names. For example, http://cl4.org/comp/gender/, describes an algorithm for estimating the gender of a name by combining the gender probability of each trigraph in a name. There's also been some research on gender estimation based on hyphenation. See http://junobeach.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~warren/publications/warren:isi:2004/check_name_gender.pdf

I think a combination of look-up and statistical analysis would be the most accurate.

|||This sounds to me like I would manually have to enter names for it to work. Is this correct? I think I should have been more clear in my question. We have a table of about 1 milllion records we need to check to determine the gender of the names and, I was hoping I guess, to be able to run some sort command or something to check and genderize the names in the table. Thank you for your help and maybe I am a little unclear on how your answer would work..

Fuzzy Lookup and Case

Hi,

Could someone please help!

Im doing a fuzzy lookup based on 3 fields (Surname/DOB/Gender). The only difference between the two sets of data is the case of the first letter of the Surname.

Reference table has "Stuart" Lookup has "stuart", I have set Fuzzy Lookup Input for Surname to Ignore Case but still it won't match.

The DOB/Gender are Exsactly the same.

Why does this not work? I there a work around?

Many Thanks, Deano

This isn't a "fuzzy" workaround, but for the scenario you describe it may well work.

Try adding explicitly lower-cased versions of your comparison columns to your data flow source and to the lookup query. Use the standard Lookup transformation, with the lower-cased columns being used for the lookup matching. This will allow you to perform a case-insensitive match without the overhead of the Fuzzy Lookup transformation. If there is a match, send the rows down your data flow path. If there is not, send the rows down an error path, and then use the Fuzzy Lookup only on the error rows.|||No, still not working, I have looked at the data and converted them all to they same type (Unicode String/ String etc both now varchar(50) ) and they still don't match up .It works if I group all the datain one import but if import one of the records into the database then try and import the other it does not match (Same logic). I can't help but thing it is a data type issue but I can't see any difference.

Someone please help!