mySQL: Find most similar item

You can use the LIKE sql function ;)

You can find more info here.

Good luck

select `NAME` from `organizations` where name LIKE "foo"

Forgot to mention it :)

I don't think LIKE is what you are thinking of.
LIKE would require you to use placeholders and it doesn't evaluate which is the best match.
You need to do this pro grammatically.
Look at Edit distance, Leventhstein distance, Smith-Waterman or similar solutions.

Try to find a data mining tool like Orange which includes text mining.

No, LIKE is not good enough.

I want the MOST simular match for foo.

So if these are the items:
        green
        boo
        money
        pizza

"boo" should be returned.

and:
        green
        fio
        money
        pizza

"fio" should be returned.

E.g.:
PHP:
int levenshtein ( string $str1 , string $str2 );
returns the difference between the two strings.
If you do that for all strings in the table compared to the input string and take the result(s) with the smallest number you have the best match(es)

Is there anything like levenshtein available with pure sql ?

Not that I know of

@tkalchev
I am also interested in how you would solve this in SQL.
May solve me lots of time ;)
Do you think this would work:

SELECT `NAME` from `organizations` where soundex(NAME) = soundex(foo) ??

Well apart from the limitations it sounds too good to be true.

Probably, just test it :)