[dfdashh]

A few years back I worked on record linkage projects that relied in part on Soundex. My experience is that Soundex is on the faster side of the phonetic algorithm speed spectrum while (Double) Metaphone is on the other. In the middle are modifications to Soundex or similar approaches like Soundex2, Phonex, and NYSIIS.

For those interested I'd highly recommend the work of Peter Christen [1], who does a ton of research in this space. If you want to see some code, check out the implementations of several of these algorithms I wrote a while back [2].

[1]: http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~christen/

[2]: https://github.com/antzucaro/matchr