Use SOUNDEX() word by word on SQL Server

Question

Here is my problem. For example I have a table Products that contains a field, Name:

Products
ID | Name | ..
1  | \"USB Key 10Go\"
2  | \"I         


        

Answer 1

If you have to do it all in the RDBMS, a UDF would be the best if it's an option.

Otherwise, you could use this technique to at least soundex the first four words individually using PARSENAME:

From How do I split a string so I can access item x?:

PARSENAME(REPLACE('12 inches laptop computer', ' ', '.'), 1)  --return computer
PARSENAME(REPLACE('12 inches laptop computer', ' ', '.'), 2)  --return laptop
...

However: using PARSENAME in this way is a hack and a serious limitation is it only works for a max of 4 parts. If there are 5 or more words PARSENAME will return NULL, so you have to check for that with a conditional and degrade gracefully.

Here's a simplified example (again, without the NULL checks)

SELECT *
FROM Products 
WHERE SOUNDEX(search_input) = SOUNDEX(PARSENAME(REPLACE(Name, ' ', '.'), 4))
  OR SOUNDEX(search_input) = SOUNDEX(PARSENAME(REPLACE(Name, ' ', '.'), 3))
  OR SOUNDEX(search_input) = SOUNDEX(PARSENAME(REPLACE(Name, ' ', '.'), 2))
  OR SOUNDEX(search_input) = SOUNDEX(PARSENAME(REPLACE(Name, ' ', '.'), 1))