This month’s invitation from Steve asks us about our favourite string parsing routines. It conveniently popped up as I was trying out the new Regular Expression (Regex) functions in SQL Server 2025. I adore them for handling string validation and parsing, which I’ve historically done in .Net or PowerShell. Now that we’re on the cusp of adoption […]
String parsing is a regular occurrence when it comes to data engineering. Splitting strings, converting, combining – all in an effort to bring some order. Sometimes we need a more powerful tool, and that would be Regular Expressions (Regex). Regular expressions are something I have a fondness for under the right conditions, and with them being introduced […]
Performing a wildcard search by throwing a % into a LIKE expression is bread and butter. How do we handle this when we actually want to search for the wildcard though? This was an issue I first saw early in my career before I was even building database solutions. The business had a back office solution where you could […]
Andy Brownsword 