Is it possible to perform T-SQL fuzzy lookup without SSIS?

Question

SSIS 2005/2008 does fuzzy lookups and groupings. Is there a feature that does the same in T-SQL?

Answer 1

Fuzzy lookup uses a q-gram approach, by breaking strings up into tiny sub-strings and indexing them. You can then then search input by breaking it up into equally sized strings. You can inspect the format of their index and write a CLR function to use the same style of index but you might be talking about a fair chunk of work.

It is actually quite interesting how they did it, very simple yet provides very robust matching and is very configurable.

From that I recall of the index when I last looked at it, each q-gram or substring is stored in a row in an table (the index). That row contains an nvarchar column (among other values) that is used as binary data and contains references to the rows that match.

There is also an open feedback suggestion on Microsoft Connect for this feature.