SQL Compare Characters in two strings count total identical - sql

Question

So the over all on this is I have two different systems and in both systems I have customers, unfortunately both systems allow you to type in the business name freehand so you end up with the example below.
Column A has a value of "St John Baptist Church"
Column B has a value of "John Baptist St Church"
What I need to come up with is a query that can compare the two columns to find the most closely matched values.
From there I plan to write a web app where I can have someone go through and validate all of the entries. I would enter in some example of what I have done, but unfortunately I honestly dont even know if what I am asking for is even possible. I would think it is though in this day and age I am sure I am not the first one to try to attempt this.

Answer 1

You could try and create a script something like this php script to help you:
$words = array();
$duplicates = array();
function _compare($value, $key, $array) {
global $duplicates;
$diff = array_diff($array, $value);
if (!empty($diff)) {
$duplicates[$key] = array_keys($diff);
}
return $diff;
}
$mysqli = new mysqli('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'database');
$query = "SELECT id, business_name FROM table";
if ($result = $mysqli->query($query)) {
while ($row = $result->fetch_object()) {
$pattern = '#[^\w\s]+#i';
$row->business_name = preg_replace($pattern, '', $row->business_name);
$_words = explode(' ', $row->business_name);
$diff = array_walk($words, '_compare', $_words);
$words[$row->id][] = $_words;
$result->close();
}
}
$mysqli->close();
This is not tested but you need something like this, because I don't think this is possible with SQL alone.
---------- EDIT ----------
Or you could do a research on what the guys in the comment recommend Levenshtein distance in T-SQL
Hope it helps, good luck!