Question

I am using SQL Server 2008 and need to write a query that should return a record of ABCDEFGH if a user enters a search string such as ABCD-EFGH or ABDEFGH etc (i.e. records that are similar to).

How would I accomplish that?

Answer 1

you need to employ some sort of editDistance algorithm i.e Levenshtein distance ,Jaro–Winkler distance to calculate the difference between 2 strings.

look at this thread for Levenshtein distance implemented as udf

Levenshtein distance in T-SQL

you will use the UDF like this (just an example)

SELECT * FROM dbo.myTable
WHERE   dbo.editDistance(mycol,@SearchString)<2