From: Johan De Meersman Date: April 29 2011 9:56am Subject: Re: Join based upon LIKE List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/224911 Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jerry Schwartz" > > [JS] This isn't the only place I have to deal with fuzzy data. :-( > Discretion prohibits further comment. Heh. What you *really* need, is a LART. Preferably one of the spiked variety. > A full-text index would work if I were only looking for one title at > a time, but I don't know if that would be a good idea if I have a list of > 10000 titles. That would pretty much require either 10000 separate queries > or a very, very long WHERE clause. Yes, unfortunately. You should see if you can introduce a form of data normalisation - say, shadow fields with corrected entries, or functionality in the application that suggests correct entries based on what the user typed. Or, if the money's there, you could have a look at Amazon Mechanical Turk (yes, really) for cheap-ish data correction. -- Bier met grenadyn Is als mosterd by den wyn Sy die't drinkt, is eene kwezel Hy die't drinkt, is ras een ezel