running-count too high

[jsibley]

Hello Everyone,
I'm trying to figure out why it is that my running-count is displaying too high of a number.  I'm putting together a list of employees and their emergency contacts phone numbers. 

The query calculation looks like this:
running-count ([Phone Data X].[Emergency Contacts Reference Data Key] for [Phone Data X].[Contact Name (First MI Last Suffix)])

The Emergency Contacts Reference Data Key is the Employee Number and the Contact Name is the Emergency Contact's name.  So the product of this is to get a running count of how many phone numbers each of the employee's contacts have. 
The problem is that it's default to 2 for a specific employee.  It should show a record for 1 and 2.  But because it only sees  2 it kicks it out because there was no 1 beforehand.  I can say there are multiple joins along the way, but it seems when I join these two tables that were the problem begins.  There are thousands of other records that are doing just as planned.  It's just about a dozen or so that this problem arises.

We are trying to migrate our data into another system.

[jsibley]

This has been resolved.  The problem was two employees had a mother by the same name even though they weren't related.  I had to change how I calculated my running count to include address because they lived it two different homes.

I'm not sure how to resolve this ticket. 

[dougp]

It's not a ticket.  It's a forum post.

You should always use the employee ID (some alphanumeric value that HR uses to ensure they are working with the correct employee data) NOT employee name.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Plus, what if those two people had the same address?

[jsibley]

I did that.  See my original post. The issue has been resolved.

[dougp]

Your response to your original post indicates you didn't.

In your original post you said you used

Code Select Expand

running-count ([Phone Data X].[Emergency Contacts Reference Data Key] for [Phone Data X].[Contact Name (First MI Last Suffix)])
Your response indicates you switched to using

Code Select Expand

running-count ([Phone Data X].[Emergency Contacts Reference Data Key] for [Phone Data X].[Contact Name (First MI Last Suffix)], [Phone Data X].[Home Address])
I'm saying you should probably use something like

Code Select Expand

running-count (1 for [Phone Data X].[Emergency Contacts Reference Data Key])