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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T23:36:59+00:00

I’m merging two databases for a client. In an ideal world, I’d simply use

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I’m merging two databases for a client. In an ideal world, I’d simply use the unique id to join them, but in this case the newer table has different id’s.

So I have to join the tables on another column. For this I need to use a complex LIKE statement to join on the Title field. But… they have changed the title’s of some rows which breaks the join on those rows.

How can I write a complex LIKE statement to connect slightly different titles?

For instance:

Table 1 Title = Freezer/Pantry Storage Basket
Table 2 Title = Deep Freezer/Pantry Storage Basket

or

Table 1 Title = Buddeez Bread Buddy
Table 2 Title = Buddeez Bread Buddy Bread Dispenser

Again, there are hundreds of rows with titles only slightly different, but inconsistently different.

Thanks!

UPDATE:

How far can MySQL Full-Text Search get me? Looks similar to Shark’s suggestion in SQL Server.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Do it in stages. First get all the ones that match out of the way so that you are only working with the exceptions. Your mind is incredibly smarter than the computer in finding things that are ‘like’ each other so scan over the data and look for similarities and make sql statements that cover the specific cases you see until you get it narrowed down as much as possible.

    You will have better results if you ‘help’ the computer in stages like this than if you try to develop a big routine to cover all cases at once.

    Of course there are certainly apis out there that do this already (such as the one google uses to guess your search phrase before you finish it) but whether any are freely available I don’t know. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to search for one though.

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