Have you ever had the need to use Regular Expressions directly in SQL Server? I sometimes hear or see others refer to using RegEx in TSQL. But I always assume they’re talking about the TSQL LIKE operator, because RegEx isn’t natively supported. In TSQL’s defence, you can get a lot of mileage out of LIKE and some clever pattern matching strings, even though it’s not authentic RegEx. You can leverage RegEx libraries in the .NET Framework via a CLR stored procedure. You should also be able to do something similar with an old-school extended stored procedure.
I discussed all of this during a recent interview. It was a day or two afterwards (of course) when it dawned on me that there’s another way to leverage RegEx from TSQL: the R language. Prior to this mini-revelation, I had always thought of R (and Python) as strictly a means to an end for Data Science and related disciplines. Now I am thinking I’ve been looking at R and Python through too narrow of a lens and I should take a larger view.
I think I’d prefer CLR for this because there’s additional overhead to making R Services calls, but it’s a clever use of R Services.