A friend of mine asked me:

I’m hoping you can help me out with something — I’m trying to optimize a search feature. Since it uses a MySQL database, the search already uses the LIKE statement to get matches for a search query, we might be needing something more flexible. I found mention on MySQL’s website about something called the SOUNDS LIKE expression that can be more flexible than LIKE. Do you know anything about this? If you do, can you point me a direction where I might be able to learn more about it? Thanks in advance for your help!

My response:
(more…)