Back in 1999 I worked at an early web consultancy that built apps for clients on top of Oracle. We used their DB + a programming language called PL/SQL.

There was a feature of Oracle called SOUNDEX which was magical. Here's an example from their docs page [1]:

    SELECT last_name, first_name
    FROM hr.employees
    WHERE SOUNDEX(last_name)= SOUNDEX('SMYTHE');

This query will return all people with a last name that sounds like 'Smythe', including 'Smith' and 'Smithe'.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/funct...