SQL Day 2022 - Regular Expressions in SQL Server - 20 Years of Development - Dejan Sarka
The first demo you can find for Java support in SQL Server is about using regular expressions (regex) in the Database Engine. I remember that the regex usage was the first example for CLR functions in SQL Server as well. I started to analyze the problem of supporting regular expressions in SQL Server. In this presentation, which is mainly demo based, I am showing and comparing ten different solutions for simple expressions that also the LIKE operator supports: Java, T-SQL LIKE operator with and without a nonclustered index support, XQuery contains() function with and without XML indexes, Full-Text Search CONTAINS operator, scalar function written in C#.NET, R code using the rxDataStep() function from the RevoScaleR package, R with the data.table object, and Python language with the regular pandas str.contains() function. I hope you are curious to see the comparison of the performance and complexity of the code of the different solutions I mentioned.