Regular Expressions for Mere Mortals

Chase Cottle

With the announcement of regular expression support in Azure SQL DB, Microsoft will be adopting a powerful tool for querying and manipulating data offered by many other RDBMS, though limited regular expressions functionality is already supported by other RDBMS platforms like Postgres, Oracle and MySQL. If you’ve ever worked with regular expressions, you know how powerful they can be, but if you’re new or inexperienced with regular expressions, they are likely intimidating and confusing. This presentation will attempt to help demystify regular expressions by showing you how to write an expression, understand the syntax, and utilize expressions flexibly. By the time this class is over, you’ll have the confidence to solve real world problems with regular expressions!