Trying to group similar text rows in a column of a million row table - Open to Non-MySQL approaches

Question

I have a large number (about 40 million) of VARCHAR entries in a MySQL table. The length of the string can be anywhere between 5-80 characters. I am trying to group similar text together and thought of a possible approach:

Take a row and calculate a similarity measure (like Edit Distance) with every other row and decide (I am not sure how to decide though) whether each belongs to the same group. For instance, I have the following entries:

The quick brown fox
The qick brwn fox
This is another sentence
Ths is another sntence

I want to be able to convert this into a form where I assign a group ID and then get the best match (so in this case, it would be 'The quick brown fox' and 'This is another sentence' but assign the group ID of 1 to both the 'The quick brown fox' and 'The qick brwn fox' entries and 2 to the other set).

Is there a better approach for such a problem? Like maybe utilize indexing schemes or other database advantages? Also, just a confirmation, I am not trying to find rows containing similar text, but rather rows that are similar to each other. Perhaps, a good reasoning I can give is that some rows are different due to typo errors and I want to correct them.

EDIT 2: Open to other ways not using MySQL that could be reasonably comparable to a DB's performance

So after a little research and the answer given below, this will not be so easy and I might have to look into fuzzy matching. Are there any good approaches for this considering that my data is now stored in a database?

EDIT 1: Attempt using MySQL's FULLTEXT

mysql> create table fulltextsim(id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, text TEXT, FULLTEXT(text));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.44 sec)

mysql> insert into fulltextsim(text) VALUES("The quick brown fox");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> insert into fulltextsim(text) VALUES("The qick brwn fox");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> insert into fulltextsim(text) VALUES("This is another sentence");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> insert into fulltextsim(text) VALUES("Ths is anther sntence");
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM fulltextsim WHERE MATCH(text) AGAINST ('The qick brwn');
+----+-------------------+
| id | text              |
+----+-------------------+
|  2 | The qick brwn fox |
+----+-------------------+
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM fulltextsim WHERE MATCH(text) AGAINST ('The qick fox');
+----+-------------------+
| id | text              |
+----+-------------------+
|  2 | The qick brwn fox |
+----+-------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I wanted the 'The quick brown fox' row as well.

Answer 1

Have you looked at MySQL's FULLTEXT functiality ?

UPDATE -- MySQL's FULLTEXT doesn't seem to support fuzzy searching, which is what you are looking for here. Check out MySQL Full Text Search Boolean Mode Partial Match

MySQL does support the SOUNDEX() function, which will match words that sound similar to what is entered, but this does not work for phrases.

So, I think you may be out of luck.