SOUNDS LIKE

Compares the pronunciation of two strings by their Soundex codes. Soundex is a phonetic algorithm that produces a code representing the pronunciation of a string, allowing for approximate matching of strings based on their pronunciation rather than their spelling. TiDB Cloud Lake offers the SOUNDEX function that allows you to get the Soundex code from a string.

SOUNDS LIKE is frequently employed in the WHERE clause of SQL queries to narrow down rows using fuzzy string matching, such as for names and addresses, see Filtering Rows in Examples.

Syntax

<str1> SOUNDS LIKE <str2>

Arguments

Return Type

Return a Boolean value of 1 if the Soundex codes for the two strings are the same (which means they sound alike) and 0 otherwise.

Examples

Comparing Strings

SELECT 'two' SOUNDS LIKE 'too'
----
1

SELECT CONCAT('A', 'B') SOUNDS LIKE 'AB';
----
1

SELECT 'Monday' SOUNDS LIKE 'Sunday';
----
0

Filtering Rows

SELECT * FROM  employees;

id|first_name|last_name|age|
--+----------+---------+---+
 0|John      |Smith    | 35|
 0|Mark      |Smythe   | 28|
 0|Johann    |Schmidt  | 51|
 0|Eric      |Doe      | 30|
 0|Sue       |Johnson  | 45|

SELECT * FROM  employees
WHERE  first_name SOUNDS LIKE 'John';

id|first_name|last_name|age|
--+----------+---------+---+
 0|John      |Smith    | 35|
 0|Johann    |Schmidt  | 51|