The subject disclosure pertains to a powerful and flexible framework for record matching. The framework facilitates design of a record matching query or package composed of a set of well-defined primitive operators (e.g., relational, data cleaning . . . ), which can ultimately be executed to match records. To assist design of such packages, a learning technique based on examples is provided. More specifically, a set of matching and non-matching record pairs can be input and employed to facilitate automatic package generation. A generated package can subsequently be transformed manually and/or automatically into a semantically equivalent form optimized for execution.