Monster Text Manipulation: Regular Expressions for the DBA, by Sean McCown

Regular expressions can help you perform incredible tasks with very little effort. Need to create 1700 logins from an email request? Developers give you a single script with 300 stored procedures filled with table variables instead of temp tables? Need to move 500 databases to a different drive? Any of these tasks can take a long time to code, but regular expressions cuts that work from hours to seconds. I use regular expressions all the time and I have taken many tasks down from several days to just a few minutes. Stop writing code manually and let regular expressions do it for you.

Here you’ll learn:
• The most useful regular expression commands.
• The appropriate times to use regular expressions.
• How to use regular expressions to write code for you.
• How to incorporate regular expressions into large tasks and combine them with other methods.

Sean McCown is a Certified Master in SQL Server and a SQL Server MVP with 20 years of experience in high-end databases. He is also founder and co-owner of the MidnightDBA.com website, where he records free SQL Server training videos and co-hosts the popular web show DBAs@Midnight. He is also an international speaker and the creator and author of the wildly popular (and free) Minion Maintenance tools and is President and Chief Architect of MinionWare Software.