Abhiman Tiwari has a big announcement:
We are pleased to announce the private preview of regular expressions (regex) support in Azure SQL Database. Regex is a powerful tool that allows you to search, manipulate, and validate text data in flexible ways. With regex support, you can enhance your SQL queries with pattern matching, extraction, replacement, and more. You can also combine them with other SQL functions and operators to create complex expressions and logic.
This is something I’ve wanted to see in SQL Server for years, and I’m excited that there’s official support now. Prior to that, you could use SQL# to perform some regular expression operations using the CLR, but as long as performance is reasonable on these, it’s a huge feature to include.