Greetings, I have two tables that are populated using large datasets from disparate external systems, and I am trying to match records by customer name between these two tables. I do not have any authoritative key, such as customerID or nationalID, by which I can match them up, and I have found many cases where the same customer has different first names in the two datasets. A sampling of the differences is as follows: Michael <=> Mike Tom <=> Thomas Liz <=> Elizabeth Margaret <=> Maggie How can I build a query in PostgreSQL (v. 9.6) that will find possible matches like these on nicknames? My initial guess is that I would have to either find or build some sort of intermediary table that contains associated names like those above. Sometimes though, there will be more than matching pairs, like: Jim <=> James <=> Jimmy <=> Jimmie Bill <=> Will <=> Willie <=> William and so forth. Has anyone used or developed PostgreSQL queries that will find matches like these? I am running all my database queries. on my local laptops (Win7 and macOS), so performance or uptime is no issue here. I am curious to see how others in this community have creatively solved this common problem. One of the PostgreSQL dictionaries (synonym, thesaurus etc.) might work here, but honestly I am clueless as to how to set this up or use it in queries successfully. Thanks, Michael (aka Mike, aka Mikey) -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
