A most long-awaited new feature in SQL 2025 is regular expressions. Regular expressions permit us to easily perform advanced find/replace operations, that in older versions of SQL Server were very cumbersome or about impossible to implement.

In this session we will learn how regular expressions work in SQL Server. I will start with the most basic operations and compare it with the LIKE operator, but as the session progresses, I leave LIKE behind to introduce the more advanced features that constitute the core of why regular expressions are so powerful.

This session is intended for persons who have mainly worked in SQL Server, and who have never bothered to learn regular expression, since they have not been available. Thus, no previous knowledge or experience of regular expressions is required. As the title says: this is an introduction. SQL-wise, I will assume that you have a year or two of experience of general T-SQL programming, including use of the LIKE operator and some of the other built-in string functions.