> also, i'd be happy to listen opinions from people who have experience
of usage
> of such things like soundex.
Soundex is grossly outdated. It was designed for manual use by 19th century
census takers, and I'm always surprised to see it still used. Metaphone
(google search gets good results) does a much better job of matching names,
and double metaphone does even better although having each word mapped to
possibly 2 equivalents might complicate your logic depending on your
queries.
--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe(at)killerbytes(dot)com
http://www.killerbytes.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice