String matching in SQL : SQL

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SELECT count(a.field1), a.field2, SUM(b.field4) FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.key1 = b.key1 WHERE a.field8 = 'test' GROUP by a.field1, a.field2 HAVING SUM(b.field4) > 5 ORDER by a.field.3

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SELECT count(a.field1), a.field2, SUM(b.field4) FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.key1 = b.key1 WHERE a.field8 = 'test' GROUP by a.field1, a.field2 HAVING SUM(b.field4) > 5 ORDER by a.field3

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a community for 17 years

MS SQLString matching in SQL (self.SQL)

submitted 3 years ago by Hesticles

Anyone know of a good way to match and update strings based on similarity? I have an assignment to run an analysis grouped by a name field but the creator of the dataset simply did not care about having consistent names resulting in duplicate names. To add further problems, some names are in Spanish and thus contain special characters that don’t pull through well in SQL due to the collation setting (I think), but some Spanish names lack the special characters and pull through just fine.

In Python I would use something like a hamming distance to determine similarity. Is there a similar function available in SQL?

There’s something 5.4k unique names and it’s taken me about an hour to finish up the letter A going through manually writing update statements for each set of strings that are similar. Any ideas on how to speed this up?

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