I have about 120,000 organization names in table1 which I am trying to match against 75,000 organization names in table2 and see if they are a perfect match, a partial match or don't match at all.
I was looking at Natural Language Full Text Searches, (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-natural-language.html) and it seems to be along the lines of what I'm looking for but not exactly. "By default, the MATCH()<http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html#function_match> function performs a natural language search for a string against a text collection. A collection is a set of one or more columns included in a FULLTEXT index. The search string is given as the argument to AGAINST(). For each row in the table, MATCH()<http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html#function_match> returns a relevance value; that is, a similarity measure between the search string and the text in that row in the columns named in the MATCH()<http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html#function_match> list." My question is, can the argument in AGAINST() refer to a column in another table or does it have to be a specific string you are searching for? If the MATCH() function won't work, any suggestions on how else to compare table1.name against table2.name? The columns are defined as VARCHAR. This is for MySQL 5.0, and the tables are MyISAM. They are fairly small temporary tables created for one off comparison purposes, so performance is not a big consideration. JF
