Search unreliable author names
<p>We have scanned thousands of old documents and entered key data into a database. One of the fields is author name.</p>

<p>We need to search for documents by a given author but the exact name might have been entered incorrectly as on many documents the data is handwritten.</p>

<p>I thought of searching for only the first few letters of the surname and then presenting a list for the user to select from. I don't know at this stage how many distinct authors there are, I suspect it will be in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands. There will be hundreds of thousands of documents.
Is there a better way? Would an SQL database handle it better?</p>

<p>The software is python, and there will be a list of documents each with an author.</p>
