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From: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: SOUNDEX (or equiv) source, Oracle FTP site
Keywords: SOUNDEX, ORACLE, FTP
Message-ID: <9370@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 90 16:24:43 GMT
References: <1990Aug31.020725.6451@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au>
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Reply-To: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
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Organization: UBC Computing Centre, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
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In article <1990Aug31.020725.6451@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au> exnirad@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Nirad Sharma) writes:
>I have been using the SOUNDEX function supplied with Oracle V5 and have
>found it to be very convenient except that it may be too ambiguous. I
>noticed that SOUNDEX only returns a 5 (or 4 - I forget) character string.
>Is it possible that other soundex algorithms allow less ambiguity by making
>use of more characters ?

 This goes *way* back, about 30 years to when I did payroll work,
 but if I recall correctly, the Soundex algorithm (pre-computer,
 of course) we used then always produced the same small number of
 characters so that codes could be compared.  Varying length would
 defeat this purpose, and a longer fixed length would require
 progressively more useless padding of short codes for progressively
 more names as the fixed length increased.