How can I use jaro-winkler to find the closest value in a table?

Question

I have an implementation of the jaro-winkler algorithm in my database. I did not write this function. The function compares two values and gives the probability of match.

Answer 1

Do you have a list of words that contain words like "Philadelphia"?

And who did write that function?

Oracle has package utl_match for fuzzy text comparison: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14072_01/appdev.112/e10577/u_match.htm

Can't you do

select w1.word from words w1 where jaro(w1.word,'Philadelphlaa', 9) >= 0.95

?

This will select 'Philadelphia' if that word is present in table words.