Edit

Share via

EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY (Transact-SQL)

  • Article

Applies to: Azure SQL Database SQL database in Microsoft Fabric

Note

As a preview feature, the technology presented in this article is subject to Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

Calculates a similarity value ranging from 0 (indicating no match) to 100 (indicating full match).

EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY (
    character_expression,
    character_expression
) 

Arguments

character_expression

An alphanumeric expression of character data. character_expression can be a constant, variable, or column. The character expression cannot be of type varchar(max) or nvarchar(max).

Return type

int

Remarks

This function implements the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm. If any of the inputs is NULL then the function returns a NULL value. Otherwise, the function returns an integer value from 0 to 100. The similarity value is computed as (1 – (edit_distance / greatest(len(string1), len(string2)))) * 100.

Example

The following example compares two words and returns the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() value as a column, named Distance.

SELECT 'Colour' AS WordUK, 
       'Color' AS WordUS, 
       EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('Colour', 'Color') AS Distance;

Returns:

WordUK WordUS Distance
------ ------ -----------
Colour Color  83

For additional examples, see Example EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY().

Related content