[Python] In sql, group by using similar group_name

How can I perform a

GROUP BY


in SQL when the group_name values are similar but not exactly the same?

In my dataset, the group_name values may differ slightly (e.g., "Apple Inc.", "AAPL", "Apple"), but conceptually they refer to the same entity. The similarity might not be obvious or consistent, so I might need to define a custom rule or function like is_similar() to cluster them.

For simple cases, I can extract a common pattern using regex or string functions (e.g., strip suffixes, lowercase, take prefixes). But how should I handle more complex scenarios, like fuzzy or semantic similarity?

Case:

group_name val
'Apple Inc.' 100
'AAPL' 50
'Apple' 30
'Microsoft' 80
'MSFT' 70

What I want to achieve:

new_group_name total_val
'Apple' 180
'Microsoft' 150

What are the best approaches to achieve this in SQL? And how would I write a query like this:

SELECT some_characteristic(group_name) AS new_group_name,
SUM(val)
FROM tb1
GROUP BY new_group_name;


Is it possible in Python? using gensim?

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