I had a similar problem once and being an atypical programmer and did not know the term edit distance. Some research gave me Levenshtein distance and from ther

I had a similar problem once and being an atypical programmer and did not know the term edit distance. Some research gave me Levenshtein distance and from there I first used a naive perl implementation before finding that you could extend MySQL and found an example and implemented that. Took me 1/2 a day to go from zero to working prototype