How to find best fuzzy match for a string in a large string database

Question

I have a database of strings (arbitrary length) which holds more than one million items (potentially more).

I need to compare a user-provided string against the whol

Answer 1

Since the amount of data is large, when inserting a record I would compute and store the value of the phonetic algorithm in an indexed column and then constrain (WHERE clause) my select queries within a range on that column.