Database Enhancement - Merging Linked Records

Tools: Airtable, n8n, Make/Integromat

The Problem: Nearly 75,000 records that had duplicates and linked records across 3 tabs. I needed to merge the duplicates while keeping the linked records intact. 

Available solutions were able to merge duplicates but could not combine the linked records. 
Nor could I find any Airtable scripts that could dedupe and maintain the linked records. 

The Process

I start my process by identfying big issues that I don’t know the answers to. 

In this case, how to combine linked records and return them via API when it ranges from 1-2000+ linked records. 
To test this, I turned to the Airtable API docs to determine JSON structures and then built them out in Make. 
I am a certified partner with Make so I typically start building there to do rapid testing. 

Once the difficult questions are answered, I build out the rest of the scenario and work through the nuances of the workflow.