New T-SQL Functions

Tomaz Kastrun has been busy with this year’s advent of SQL Server 2025 blog posting. Catching up, Tomaz first looks at base-64 encoding and decoding:

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new T-SQL functions for BASE64 varbinary expressions. The first function returns base64-encoded text (BASE64_ENCODE() ), respectively for BASE64_DECODE().

BASE64_ENCODE converts the value of a varbinary expression into a base64-encoded varchar expression.

BASE64_DECODE converts a base64-encoded varchar expression into the corresponding varbinary expression.

I really like this, by the way. Base-64 encoding is quite useful for web transmissions, so having a place to generate that output easily is nice.

Second up is REGEXP_LIKE():

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new T-SQL functions for Regular Expressions (RegEx).

With multiple RegEx functions, the LIKE function indicates if the regular expression pattern matches the string or is in a string. The function is REGEXP_LIKE() that will do the job.

And third, we have REGEXP_SUBSTR() and REGEXP_REPLACE():

Continuing with SQL Server 2025 T-SQL functions for Regular Expressions for replace and substring functionalities.

Click through for Tomaz’s thoughts on all five of these functions.