This was announced last week at Microsoft Ignite and it’s been covered by others such as Brent Ozar, but if you haven’t heard, SQL Server 2025 is now generally available. Here is the Microsoft announcement which covers the changes and also provides links to download.
I reference Brent’s posts because he indicates some of the features he likes and what he has seen in testing. He also does indicate that the new RegEx feature doesn’t perform well, but I’m not surprised at that. Like Brent wrote, SQL Server has not been historically good at string manipulation. That’s not its bread and butter. RegEx within SQL Server will serve some niche use cases, and I’m glad to see it included for that reason.