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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 05/19/2025
ms.service sql
ms.subservice t-sql
ms.topic reference
dev_langs
TSQL
monikerRange =azuresqldb-current || =azuresqldb-mi-current || =fabric || >=sql-server-2016
ms.custom
build-2025

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.
  • SQL Server support for EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY introduced in [!INCLUDE sssql25-md].

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 cannot be of type varchar(max) or nvarchar(max).

Return type

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.

Example

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().

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