Searching in SAS Anti-Money Laundering: Global Search
SAS Anti-Money Laundering enables users to perform searches to discover information in support of their investigation efforts. In this blog, I give a brief description of one type of search that you can perform in the solution, a global search, and I include some examples within the solution.
A global search enables you to search for any object within the data repository. It’s important to mention that search terms are case-insensitive.
Let’s look at some examples that you might use when performing a global search.
The search terms “Jack and Jill” return all indexed data containing the phrase Jack and Jill, in that order (note the quotation marks).
The search terms Jack AND Jill return all indexed data containing the words Jack and Jill. It is important to note that the operator must be in all capital letters.
The search terms Jack Jill return all indexed data containing the word Jack or Jill, or data that contains both Jack and Jill.
The search terms Jack NOT Jill return all indexed data containing the word Jack that does not also contain the word Jill.
The search terms "Jack Jill"~3 return all indexed data containing the words Jack and Jill within three words of each other, in any order.
The question mark is a single-character wildcard. The search term ?ill returns all indexed data containing the words Jill, hill, will, and so on. It does not return data containing ill or thrill.
The tilde enables you to perform a fuzzy search. A fuzzy search finds objects that contain terms close to your search terms without matching exactly (for example, when words stored in the data repository are misspelled or mistyped). The example here, the~, returns all indexed data containing the common misspelling teh.
The search terms first_name: Jack return all indexed data containing the word Jack in the field first_name.
Lastly, the asterisk is a multiple-character wildcard, including zero characters. The search term t*ill returns all indexed data containing the words till, thrill, trill, treadmill, and so on.
It’s important to mention that you cannot start a search using a leading wildcard (for example, *ill). However, searching for * with no additional search terms returns all indexed data. Let’s take a look at this:
To access global search, on the menu bar, click Search. In the Search field, I enter the wildcard character, which is an asterisk, and then press Enter. This will return all objects in the system. The filters pane shows the various entities that exist.
Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
Next, let's perform a global search on the customer Robin Hunt. In the screenshot below, notice that in the Search field, I entered "Robin Hunt". The quotation marks ensure that results with the string Robin Hunt, in that exact order, are returned. After I press enter, I see that there are three results. An account, a customer, and a household - all associated with Robin Hunt.
I can click on Robin Hunt's household to see additional information in the Object Inspector pane on the right. To see even more details, I can double-click Robin Hunt's household.
Knowing how to search the database is such an important part of the investigation process. To learn more about searching and SAS Anti-Money Laundering in general, please visit https://support.sas.com/en/software/sas-anti-money-laundering-support.html.
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