Regular expressions are a way of doing complex string searches. They can be really useful, but they have a reputation: they’re hard to write, hard to read, and they’re even harder to troubleshoot. Once you master ’em, though, they come in handy for very specific situations.
This post isn’t about their complexity, though. This post is about Azure SQL DB & SQL Server 2025’s regex performance.
In this case, regular expressions are like Everclear.
Everclear is a brand of alcohol, and when you read that, you might think, “Sounds interesting, I wonder what it tastes like.” It’s marketed as odorless,