Abstract: A computer-implemented method, comprising: using a normalization service of a first application virtual compute instance hosted in and executing in a cloud computing facility, accessing a plurality of digitally stored data records of a transaction processing system, each of the data records comprising a plurality of data values for a corresponding plurality of attributes; using the normalization service, executing a data cleaning operation on the data records by programmatically calling two or more data cleaning functions, each of the data cleaning functions corresponding to a particular attribute among the plurality of attributes; using the normalization service, creating and storing a plurality of clusters in memory of the first application virtual compute instance by clustering the data records based on exact matches of the data values of a first attribute and creating and storing references to the data records in the clusters; using the normalization service, joining two or more clusters among the plurali