The data constraint framework solution of the present invention addresses data quality issues by standardizing, verifying, matching, consolidating and merging data records using powerful inexact matching logic and search reduction technologies. The data conditioning framework uses these technologies to more efficiently condition data to improve the quality of data and/or resolve quality data issues such as incomplete, inaccurate and duplicate data records. For example, the data conditioning framework is used to “cleanse” incorrect, incomplete and duplicate data from a data source, such as an information system. The data conditioning framework uses the following approximate searching and matching techniques to improve the efficiency of the approximate matching, reduce the search space for approximate matching, and improve the speed of executing approximate searches and matches: 1) inexact trimmed matching, 2) adaptive search ordering, 3) cascading search space reduction, 4) tiered and metric indexing, and 5) domain knowledge matching.