Re: General guidance: Levenshtein distance versus other similarity algorithms

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Rachel Owsley
<Rachel.Owsley@edointeractive.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am hoping you can give me some guidance here. I’m using postgresql 9.1.
>
> Basically, I’m trying to create a query on a table of businesses that will
> return all similar matches to a business name. This is a huge table, and
> there is a lot of variation in names. The length of the string can be up to
> 255. I’ve used regex, but there are always some variations of the name that
> are missed when I do a regex. So I decided to look at distance measures.
>
> Has anyone compared the fuzzstrmatch package to pgsimilarity?
>
> Would the levenshtein function in postgresql be the best way to go here? If
> so, should I use levenshtein in the contribution package or install the
> pgsimilarity package? Has anyone tried both implementations?

Another option that works with 9.1 is the pg_trgm module
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/pgtrgm.html).   It works
very well for 9.1 and has the advantage of having built-in gist and
gin operator support.

Can't speak on pg_similarity, haven't used it.

merlin