Thread: Approximate/Fuzzy matching when we have a huge list

I have a table in mySql database containing the complete information of a user. Now, I want to find the record of the user on the basis of user name entered by user. And I want to make my matching intelligent for example if user enters "Bilal Ahmed" and the actual entry in table is "Bilal Ahmad". Notice there is the difference of just single character. Soundex will be time consuming and will not effective too from accuracy point of view as I have 17 lakh records increasing dat by day ... kindly suggest me how I can approach to this issue ?

It's a tricky problem, primarily because it is an issue of semantics. There is a good answer on Superuser that outlines a few algorithms to try. Also, this has nothing to do with Java.