We are happy to announce the Private Preview of Regular Expressions (Regex) support on Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI). This new feature brings powerful text processing capabilities to your SQL queries, enabling you to perform complex pattern matching and data manipulation with ease. 

Regex support in Azure SQL

The Regex feature in Azure SQL follows the POSIX standard and is compatible with the standard regex syntax and supports a variety of regex functions, such as REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_REPLACE, and REGEXP_SUBSTR. The feature also supports case sensitivity, character classes, quantifiers, anchors, and capturing groups.  

Here are the functions and features supported: 

• REGEXP_LIKE: Checks if a string matches a regular expression pattern. 

• REGEXP_COUNT: Returns the number of times a pattern occurs in a string. 

• REGEXP_INSTR: Returns the position of the first or the last (based on the specified option) occurrence of a pattern in a string. 

• REGEXP_REPLACE: Replaces occurrences of a pattern in a string with another string. 

• REGEXP_SUBSTR: Extracts a substring that matches a regular expression pattern. 

To start using Regex in Azure SQL MI, simply include the relevant Regex functions in your SQL queries. To learn more about the Regex functions, please visit this blog: https://aka.ms/regex-prpr-blog 

Getting Started 

To start using Regex feature in Azure SQL MI, please ensure to select “Always-up-to-date” update policy on the Additional Settings tab of instance create portal blade to get access to all new SQL engine features as soon as they are available in Azure.

Join the Preview 

The Regex feature is currently in private preview in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI). If you are interested to participate in the private preview and try out the regex feature, please fill out this form: https://aka.ms/regex-preview-signup 

For more details, you can refer this blog – https://aka.ms/regex-prpr-blog, 

Feedback 

We value your feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve and enhance Azure SQL. Please share your thoughts and experiences about Regex feature with us through https://aka.ms/sqldbregex-feedback 

Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to seeing how you leverage Regex to simplify and enhance your data processing tasks.