I have a dataset with about 100 company names and I want find close matches to these names in another set that has 20,000 company names and an associated ID number. I know that there are numerous data step ways to do this for a single company ie where cname contains "ABC Corp"; and I could use these ways in a macro loop but I thought there would be more elegant and flexible SQL way to handle all names in a single pass. Unfortunately, all of may efforts to use 'contains' 'like' or 'index()' in the same way as on a.cname = b.name gives an error or this note

66 proc sql; 67 create table temp2 68 as select * 69 from temp1 as b 70 left join cnames as a 71 on a.cname contains b.cname1; NOTE: The execution of this query involves performing one or more Cartesian product joins that can not be optimized. NOTE: Table WORK.TEMP2 created, with 5 rows and 15 columns.

and no joins are made (all comuns in temp2 are filled with missing values except cname1

any ideas or is this hopeless?