Re: Fuzzy search

"Al Reid" <areidjr_at_nospamhotmail.com> wrote:
> "Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message
> news:1074784505.698129_at_yasure...
> > Al Reid wrote:
> >
> > > First, I have Oracle 8.1.7.
> > >
> > > My "customer" has requested that they be able to retrieve only the
> > > correct records from the database where they do not know
> exactly
> > > how the data was entered. The are referring to it as a fuzzy search.
> > >
> > > For example, the want to retrieve info from a customer database by
> > > customer name. The entry in the database is 'A B C Corp'
> > >
> > > They want to be able to retrieve the record if the type in any of the
> > > following:
> > >
> > > A. B. Corp
> > > A.B. Corp
> > > AB Corp
> > > A.B Corp, etc.

uh, that's pretty fuzzy. What happened to the "C" in "A B C Corp"? Do they want to also find "NBC", "ABC", and "CBS"? If they want "George Washington" but they accidentally spell it "Thomas Jefferson", do they want you magically correct that, also?

> > > I currently use SPs to retrieve the records from a VB program. Is
> > > there something I could add to the SP to provide this functionality
> > > without severely effecting performance?

It's effect on performance would depend on how large the customer table is. For some systems, doing FTS of the customer table 10 times a minute would have no meaningful impact. For others, it would be fatal. Strictly speaking, it may not have to do a FTS (for example, if you always insist that at the list the first letter is not fuzzy), but I think that's a good estimate to use for performance impact.

> >
> > SELECT ...
> > FROM ...
> > WHERE some_column LIKE 'A%B%Corp%';
> >
>
> Would that not then return a record for Customer Name = 'Allen Bradley
> Corporation' in addition? If so, it is not selective or fuzzy enough.
>
> Is the customer making an unreasonable request?

That depends on how much the customer is willing to pay for the feature, and how many customers the customer has. The less they want to pay and the more cruft there is to weed out, the more unreasonable it is.

Xho

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