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Regex In SSMS

Jen McCown goes through a good example of where regular expressions can solve a DBA’s boring and repetitive task:

What I needed was to be able to check each one of those tables, and see if any of the should-be-deleted rows still exist. Of course, I can certainly type this all out by hand…

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM dbo.Table1 WHERE val = 1) SELECT 'Table1 has undeleted rows!' as TableName;
IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM dbo.Table2 WHERE val = 1) SELECT 'Table2 has undeleted rows!' as TableName;

*Sigh*. I’m already  bored. And in reality, I had 45 of these statements, not 15. I’m not a big fan of repetitive, monkey-button work.

SSMS regular expressions are great.  I got to see a version of Sean’s linked talk in person and it helped things click in my mind.