how to recognize similar words with difference in spelling

Question

I want to filter out duplicate customer names from a database. A single customer may have more than one entry to the system with the same name but with little difference in

Answer 1

The obvious, established (and well documented) algorithms for finding string similarity are:

• Levenstein distance
• Soundex

Answer 2

Have a look at Soundex

There is a Soundex function in Transact-SQL (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187384.aspx):

SELECT 
SOUNDEX('brook berta'),
SOUNDEX('Bruck Berta'),
SOUNDEX('Biruk Berta')

returns the same value B620 for each of the example values