SDU Tools: Normalize for Search in SQL Server T-SQL

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. The NormalizeForSearch function normalizes a string to make it ready for search operations.

It makes strings comparable by stripping away differences that are usually meaningless for search or matching.

It helps to answer the question: If two strings refer to the same thing, what differences should I ignore before I even start comparing?

It returns NULL on NULL input.

This function is computationally intensive. If you have large volumes of data to compare, consider modifying it to a table-valued function.

Find out more

You can see it in action in the main image above, and in the video here:

You can use our tools as a set or as a great example of how to write functions like these.

Access to SDU Tools is one of the benefits of being an SDU Insider, along with access to our other free tools and eBooks. Please just visit here for more info:

http://sdutools.sqldownunder.com

2026-04-02