Do the police just show up at any dentist office and ask them to plug a tooth into the Tooth-Identifier 3000™?
There are thousands of dental offices.
Is there an international tooth database?
In: Biology
It is indeed very hard to search for someone using their dental records. There are notations that dentists use to say where you have cavities, other dental issues, what treatment have been done to these, etc. So you can technically put this into a database and search on this. But it is not very accurate as it can be hard to say exactly how a dentist would write something down. So you might get too many results or the dental remains may not match the description in the database enough to get a match. Dentists also do not share this information with police unless they have to, they often do not share this information with each other either.
Dental records are mostly of use when there is a suspicion of identity. This allows someone to manually compare the dental records with the dental remains. They can then look at any differences between these and see if there is an explanation for this. Cavities change over time and fillings can fall out. People also get dental care that have not been discovered in the investigation. So in general you can see if the records and remains do not match if there is no cavity in the remains where there is one in the dental records. And you can see how many of the cavities and treatments match. This can help either disprove a suspicion or strengthen it.
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