SQL: parse the first, middle and last name from a fullname field

Question

How do I parse the first, middle, and last name out of a fullname field with SQL?

I need to try to match up on names that are not a direct match on full name. I\'d

Answer 1

Unless you have very, very well-behaved data, this is a non-trivial challenge. A naive approach would be to tokenize on whitespace and assume that a three-token result is [first, middle, last] and a two-token result is [first, last], but you're going to have to deal with multi-word surnames (e.g. "Van Buren") and multiple middle names.