Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, 3rd Edition

5.4. Cutter Tables

Another encoding scheme for names has been used for libraries for more than 100 years. The catalog number of a book often needs to reduce an author’s name to a simple fixed-length code. While the results of a Cutter table look much like those of a Soundex, their goal is different. They attempt to preserve the original alphabetical order of the names in the encodings.

But the librarian cannot just attach the author’s name to the classification code. Names are not the same length, nor are they unique within their first letters. For example, “Smith, John A.” and “Smith, John B.” are not unique until the last letter.

What librarians have done about this problem is to use Cutter tables. These tables map authors’ full names into ...