Itzik Ben-Gan would like to see Row Pattern Recognition make it into T-SQL:
The ISO/IEC 9075:2016 standard (aka SQL:2016) introduces support for Row Pattern Recognition (RPR) in SQL. Similar to using regular expressions to identify patterns in a string, RPR allows you to use regular expressions to identify patterns in a sequence of rows.
To me, it’s the next step in the evolution of window functions. If you think that window functions are profound and useful, RPR is really going to bake your noodle.
RPR has limitless practical applications, including identifying patterns in stock market activity, handling time series, fraud detection, material handling, shipping applications, DNA sequencing, gaps and islands, top N per group, and many others.
I’ve voted it up and recommend you do so too. This is a great way to think of streams of data sitting in a database. If you have business use cases where this could help, adding those as comments would be great too.