I don't understand your code fragment. It doesn't say what $total and $find contain, and it doesn't use $my_name or $db_name.

So, is there not any way to match a string of some words that is contained in a bigger string but the words are not in order?

Sure there is, but that's a way of matching that has nothing to do with regexpes. A way of doing what you want is to split both strings into "words" (for whatever definition of "word" is appropriate for your problem domain - there's no universal way of splitting a string into words), then look for each of the words in your smaller string if it's in the larger string. There's a match if and only if all the words in the smaller string are found in the larger string. You should also determine when there's a match if the smaller strings contain a word more than once - may they be matched with the same word in the larger string, or must they match on different positions?