Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

At 06:46 2017-04-14, Ken Dibble wrote: [snip] [Gene:] I have a couple of anvils around my neck, too. They prevent my system from easily being multi-user. One was a reasonable trade-off at the time, but the downside continues to bite. The other was an argument I

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

On 2017-04-12 17:22, Mike wrote: I found a Levenshtein function somewhere last year and have been using it with MariaDB as a function on the MariaDB server, called from my VFP 9 application. It's exceptionally fast and works pretty well. My application needs to get "as close as" matches to a

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. Why would that be an issue of consequence? You add some columns to a table. The rest of the software can ignore them. (Unless you use select * or other black

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

At 10:15 2017-04-13, Ken Dibble wrote: Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. Why would that be an issue of consequence? You add some columns to a table. The rest of the

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 1:15 PM, Ken Dibble wrote: > > > Well, there's a separate problem--the cost of having to appy one or two UDFs > that would have to run on every name-search query. I was hoping, though, to > get some suggestions for UDFs that I could at least test and

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. Why would that be an issue of consequence? You add some columns to a table. The rest of the software can ignore them. (Unless you use select * or other black

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

Thank you everybody. I will be working through these suggestions and let you know what I come up with. Ken I remember this joy of searching names in a system that had 2+ million customers and names were all varchar() instead of a key to a secondary table. My indexes sure took a beating when

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

I found a Levenshtein function somewhere last year and have been using it with MariaDB as a function on the MariaDB server, called from my VFP 9 application. It's exceptionally fast and works pretty well. My application needs to get "as close as" matches to a random string (for manufacturer

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

At 07:55 2017-04-12, Ken Dibble wrote: Hi folks, I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it. I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove spaces,

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

Aha in turn! https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20101216062156/http://blog.donnael.com:80/2008/04/creating-an-fll/#more-1965 On Apr 12, 2017 4:19 PM, "Ted Roche" wrote: > Ah! The algorithm rang a bell! > > Garrett: have you tried searching Archive.org? A LOT of your stuff >

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

Ah! The algorithm rang a bell! Garrett: have you tried searching Archive.org? A LOT of your stuff appears archived: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/garrett%20fitzgerald%20 The equivalent FoxPro code, by the way is in the leafe downloads at https://leafe.com/dls/vfp. Bob Calco wrote it up.

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

I wrote a FLL to do Levenshtein distances for fuzzy name matching, but everything was posted to my blog, which is no longer online. It wasn't amazingly hard to figure out, though, so it might be worth finding the algorithm in C and recreating my steps. It ran much faster than equivalent Fox code

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

I remember this joy of searching names in a system that had 2+ million customers and names were all varchar() instead of a key to a secondary table. My indexes sure took a beating when I got another "Williams", the number one last name in the system, and it had to tear a page to make a new page

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

On 12/04/2017 15:55, Ken Dibble wrote: I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing. About 20 years ago I did some work on marketing databases and one of the big tasks is de-duping data. We did things

Re: Fuzzy Name Searching

FoxWeb has a full text search engine, free, that might help. http://www.foxweb.com/fwFullText/ -- Alan Bourke alanpbourke (at) fastmail (dot) fm ___ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance:

Fuzzy Name Searching

Hi folks, I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it. I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches is that in