Skip to content

edit-distance-similarity-transact-sql.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
80 lines (58 loc) · 2.67 KB

edit-distance-similarity-transact-sql.md

File metadata and controls

80 lines (58 loc) · 2.67 KB
title EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY (Transact-SQL)
description EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY calculates a similarity value ranging from 0 (indicating no match) to 100 (indicating full match).
author MikeRayMSFT
ms.author mikeray
ms.reviewer abhtiwar, wiassaf, randolphwest
ms.date 11/18/2025
ms.service sql
ms.subservice t-sql
ms.topic reference
ms.custom
ignite-2025
dev_langs
TSQL
monikerRange =azuresqldb-current || =azuresqldb-mi-current || =fabric-sqldb || >=sql-server-2016

EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY (Transact-SQL) preview

[!INCLUDE sqlserver2025-asdb-asmi-fabricsqldb]

[!INCLUDE preview]

Calculates a similarity value ranging from 0 (indicating no match) to 100 (indicating full match).

Note

  • EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY is currently in preview.
  • EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY currently doesn't support transpositions.
  • SQL Server support for EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY introduced in [!INCLUDE sssql25-md].
  • EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY is available in Azure SQL Managed Instance with the SQL Server 2025 or Always-up-to-date update policy.

Syntax

EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY (
    character_expression
    , character_expression
)

Arguments

character_expression

An alphanumeric expression of character data. character_expression can be a constant, variable, or column. The character expression can't be of type varchar(max) or nvarchar(max).

Return types

int

Remarks

This function implements the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm. If any of the inputs is NULL then the function returns a NULL value. Otherwise, the function returns an integer value from 0 to 100. The similarity value is computed as (1 – (edit_distance / greatest(len(string1), len(string2)))) * 100.

Examples

The following example compares two words and returns the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() value as a column, named Distance.

SELECT 'Colour' AS WordUK,
       'Color' AS WordUS,
       EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('Colour', 'Color') AS Distance;

Returns:

WordUK WordUS Distance
------ ------ -----------
Colour Color  83

For additional examples, see Example EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY().

Related content