You might also want to look into address normalization tools,
depending on how much data you're talking about. The standardized/
normalized USPS addresses are a lot shorter than the addresses people
tend to give you. Things like Avenue are shortened to AVE and North
becomes N, etc. Normalizing the addresses might help you out a lot.
If you put in an address here at the USPS site in the link below, it
will normalize it as an example:
http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp
You might be able to create a webservice that uses this website to
normalize all your addresses, or buy some third-party tool that does
the same.
That's probably going in another direction from what you're thinking,
but if you're mailing items, it's also worth the cost to verify that
the addresses are valid before mailing.
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