Regex in sql server

The like statement is sometimes a bit frustrating, because it has nothing to do with the regular expression you know from development in e.g. .NET. Similar to like is patindex.

The proprietary placeholders are:

• % for 0-n characters
• _ for 1 character
• [] ranges
• e.g. [a-f] for any single character between a and f inclusively
• e.g. [abcdef] for any single character between a and f inclusively
• e.g. [[] for [, - can be set as first item in list to use it, []], [_], [%]
• [^] ranges (any character which is not in the range.

Really using Regex:

• VBScript, COM
  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/khen1234/archive/2005/05/11/416392.aspx
• Project for native regex
  http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/4733/xp-pcre-Regular-Expressions-in-T-SQL
• CLR function
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163473.aspx
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w2kae45k%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

kind regards,

Daniel


EDIT: in contrary to mysql ... there you can use it in the where statement "native". E.g.:

select * from xyTable where name regexp 'asdf$'