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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

Levenshtein algorithm has been implemented in some DBMS

(E.g. PostgreSql: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/fuzzystrmatch.html)