We have a table with 6 million records, and then we have a SQL which need around 7 minutes to query the result. I think the SQL cannot be optimized any more.
The query time causes our weblogic to throw the max stuck thread exception.
Is there any recommendation for me to handle this problem ?
Following is the query, but it's hard for me to change it,
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE trim(StudentID) IN ('354354','0')
AND concat(concat(substr(table1.LogDate,7,10),'/'),substr(table1.LogDate,1,5))
BETWEEN '2009/02/02' AND '2009/03/02'
AND TerminalType='1'
AND RecStatus='0' ORDER BY StudentID, LogDate DESC, LogTime
However, I know it's time consuming for using strings to compare dates, but someone wrote before I can not change the table structure...
LogDate was defined as a string, and the format is mm/dd/yyyy, so we need to substring and concat it than we can use between ... and ... I think it's hard to optimize here.
The odds are that this query is doing a full-file scan, because you're WHERE conditions are unlikely to be able to take advantage of any indexes.
Is LogDate a date field or a text field? If it's a date field, then don't do the substr's and concat's. Just say "LogDate between '2009-02-02' and '2009-02-03' or whatever the date range is. If it's defined as a text field you should seriously consider redefining it to a date field. (If your date really is text and is written mm/dd/yyyy then your ORDER BY ... LOGDATE DESC is not going to give useful results if the dates span more than one year.)
Is it necessary to do the trim on StudentID? It is far better to clean up your data before putting it in the database then to try to clean it up every time you retrieve it.
If LogDate is defined as a date and you can trim studentid on input, then create indexes on one or both fields and the query time should fall dramatically.
Or if you want a quick and dirty solution, create an index on "trim(studentid)".
If that doesn't help, give us more info about your table layouts and indexes.
SELECT * ... WHERE trim(StudentID) IN ('354354','0')
If this is normal construct, then you need a function based index. Because without it you force the DB server to perform full table scan.
As a rule of thumb, you should avoid as much as possible use of functions in the WHERE clause. The trim(StundentID), substr(table1.LogDate,7,10) prevent DB servers from using any index or applying any optimization to the query. Try to use the native data types as much as possible e.g. DATE instead of VARCHAR for the LogDate. StudentID should be also managed properly in the client software by e.g. triming the data before INSERT/UPDATE.
If your database supports it, you might want to try a materialized view.
If not, it might be worth thinking about implementing something similar yourself, by having a scheduled job that runs a query that does the expensive trims and concats and refreshes a table with the results so that you can run a query against the better table and avoid the expensive stuff. Or use triggers to maintain such a table.
But the query time cause our weblogic to throw the max stuck thread exception.
If the query takes 7 minutes and cannot be made faster, you have to stop running this query real-time. Can you change your application to query a cached results table that you periodically refresh?
As an emergency stop-gap before that, you can implement a latch (in Java) that allows only one thread at a time to execute this query. A second thread would immediately fail with an error (instead of bringing the whole system down). That is probably not making users of this query happy, but at least it protects everyone else.
I updated the query, could you give me some advices ?
Those string manipulations make indexing pretty much impossible. Are you sure you cannot at least get rid of the "trim"? Is there really redundant whitespace in the actual data? If so, you could narrow down on just a single student_id, which should speed things up a lot.
You want a composite index on (student_id, log_date), and hopefully the complex log_date condition can still be resolved using a index range scan (for a given student id).
Without any further information about what kind of query you are executing and wheter you are using indexes or not it is hard to give any specific information.
But here are a few general tips.
Make sure you use indexes on the columns you often filter/order by.
If it is only a certain query that is way too slow, than perhaps you can prevent yourself from executing that query by automatically generating the results while the database changes. For example, instead of a count() you can usually keep a count stored somewhere.
Try to remove the trim() from the query by automatically calling trim() on your data before/while inserting it into the table. That way you can simply use an index to find the StudentID.
Also, the date filter should be possible natively in your database. Without knowing which database it might be more difficult, but something like this should probably work: LogDate BETWEEN '2009-02-02' AND '2009-02-02'
If you also add an index on all of these columns together (i.e. StudentID, LogDate, TerminalType, RecStatus and EmployeeID than it should be lightning fast.
Without knowing what database you are using and what is your table structure, its very difficult to suggest any improvement but queries can be improved by using indexes, hints, etc.
In your query the following part
concat(concat(substr(table1.LogDate,7,10),'/'), substr(table1.LogDate,1,5)) BETWEEN '2009/02/02' AND '2009/02/02'
is too funny. BETWEEN '2009/02/02' AND '2009/02/02' ?? Man, what are yuu trying to do?
Can you post your table structure here?
And 6 million records is not a big thing anyway.
It is told a lot your problem is in date field. You definitely need to change your date from a string field to a native date type. If it is a legacy field that is used in your app in this exact way - you may still create a to_date(logdate, 'DD/MM/YYYY') function-based index that transforms your "string" date into a "date" date, and allows a fast already mentioned between search without modifying your table data.
This should speed things up a lot.
With the little information you have provided, my hunch is that the following clause gives us a clue:
... WHERE trim(StudentID) IN ('354354','0')
If you have large numbers of records with unidentified student (i.e. studentID=0) an index on studentID would be very imbalanced.
Of the 6 million records, how many have studentId=0?
Your main problem is that your query is treating everything as a string.
If LogDate is a Date WITHOUT a time component, you want something like the following
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE StudentID IN (:SearchStudentId,0)
AND table1.LogDate = :SearchDate
AND TerminalType='1'
AND RecStatus='0'
ORDER BY EmployeeID, LogDate DESC, LogTime
If LogDate has a time component, and SearchDate does NOT have a time component, then something like this. (The .99999 will set the time to 1 second before midnight)
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE StudentID IN (:SearchStudentId,:StudentId0)
AND table1.LogDate BETWEEN :SearchDate AND :SearchDate+0.99999
AND TerminalType='1'
AND RecStatus='0'
ORDER BY EmployeeID, LogDate DESC, LogTime
Note the use of bind variables for the parameters that change between calls. It won't make the query much faster, but it is 'best practice'.
Depending on your calling language, you may need to add TO_DATE, etc, to cast the incoming bind variable into a Date type.
If StudentID is a char (usually the reason for using trim()) you may be able to get better performance by padding the variables instead of trimming the field, like this (assuming StudentID is a char(10)):
StudentID IN (lpad('354354',10),lpad('0',10))
This will allow the index on StudentID to be used, if one exists.
Related
I'm trying to execute a query containing LIKE in a SQL Server 2008 database, but for some reason the query takes forever and times out.
The table contains around 47 million rows with aggregated log data, and I'm trying to find a logentry for a specific machine containing a specific application name. My query looks like this:
SELECT MgmtLogID,MgmtLogSeverity, MgmtLogSource, CAST(MgmtLogText as TEXT) as MgmtLogText, MgmtLogTime, MgmtLogHost
FROM [dbo].[MgmtLog]
--Fixed values
WHERE MgmtLogOrigin = 'EventLog' AND MgmtLogSeverity <= 3
--Values depending on what I'm searching for
AND MgmtLogHost = 'MY MACHINENAME'AND MgmtLogTime > 'MY START TIME' AND MgmtLogText LIKE '% KEYWORD TO SEARCH FOR %'
ORDER BY MgmtLogTime DESC
The query executes in around 1-2 seconds without the LIKE and returns around 10 rows. With the LIKE it should return 2 rows out of those ten so it shouldn't be that taxing but it times out. I'm guessing that it has something to do with the properties of MgmLogText, but I'm not sure what. It is an ntext field that has length 16 and uses Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS collation.
In the end I need to execute the query from a php script since I need to find log records for a arbitrary number of machines and/or applications
Depending on the field type of MgmtLogText, the indexes won't be used. Also, as mentioned by other commenters, the LIKE also prevents the index from being used.
Off the top of my head, I wonder if it would work if you use a subquery. The inside query should be the one without the LIKE which only returns 10 results. Then the outside query should be the one that uses the LIKE. That way the LIKE only has to search 10 rows instead of 47 million.
There's probably a more efficient way, but I was thinking something like this:
SELECT MgmtLogID,MgmtLogSeverity, MgmtLogSource, CAST(MgmtLogText as TEXT) as MgmtLogText, MgmtLogTime, MgmtLogHost
FROM [dbo].[MgmtLog]
WHERE MgmtLogID IN (
SELECT MgmtLogID
FROM [dbo.MgmtLog]
WHERE MgmtLogOrigin = 'EventLog' AND MgmtLogSeverity <= 3
AND MgmtLogHost = 'MY MACHINENAME'AND MgmtLogTime > 'MY START TIME'
ORDER BY MgmtLogTime DESC
)
AND MgmtLogText LIKE '%some value%'
Query clauses like where colname like '%something%' are not able to take advantage of indexes and usually result in a full scan of the possible rows to ascertain which ones should be delivered
Although, as ChrisC points out in a comment, it's somewhat surprising that the more efficient clauses aren't firt used to reduce the candidate rowset down to a manageable size before trying to use like - perhaps the statistics for the table are not up to date enough for the query analysis to decide this - best run whatever counts for an explain query under SQL Server.
The reason your non-like query is so fast is because it almost certainly has an index on MgmtLogHost and/or MgmtLogTime which can be used to quickly cull unneeded rows.
One way you can fix this is to use something like insert/update triggers to process the MgmtLogText data only when changed, to extract the application names out and put them in a separate table which can be far better optimised.
Even just using such a trigger to keep a lowercased version of the column (in another column) would be an improvement. Using a case-insensitive collation means that selects run slower since they have to allow for XYZZY and xyzzy being classed as equal. If instead you maintain a lower-cased version in the table and ensure the check is done against lower case, that effort disappears as you only have one case to worry about.
And, by doing all this in the trigger, you ensure that it's only done when necessary (when the data is changed), not every time you want to select. This amortises the cost over many selects.
You can also use something like full text indexing if your DBMS supports it but I've often thought that was like trying to kill mosquitos with a thermo-nuclear warhead.
Yes, there are situations where you may need full text indexing but, in the vast majority of cases, you can gain efficiency by being a little more selective.
My website is a bit huge and looping through all the nodes using Umbraco APIs to get release and expire dates is timing out.. so I wrote the following query to find the expire and release dates of nodes..
SELECT D.nodeId, D.releaseDate, D.expireDate
FROM dbo.cmsDocument D
WHERE D.newest = 1 AND
(
D.releaseDate IS NOT NULL
OR
D.expireDate IS NOT NULL
)
can any one please confirm whether its right or wrong... If its wrong, what is the proper way to get these values..
Thanks
Anz
I don't know anything about Umbraco, but I do know that not all dbms will use an index in evaluating expressions like your_column_name IS NOT NULL.
If your target dbms doesn't treat IS NOT NULL as a sargable expression, then it won't use an index. Instead, it will do a full table scan, which can take a long time on a big table. And if it takes a long time, I suppose a timeout is still possible.
It's also possible that there isn't an index on releaseDate or expireDate. On a big table, that will slow you down a lot, too.
If you want to know which documents expired before today, maybe so you can delete them, I'd (perhaps naively) expect this standard SQL statement to work. (But I'd also expect some Umbraco housekeeping module to make this unnecessary.)
select nodeId
from cmsDocument
where expiredate < CURRENT_DATE
I'm not trying to start a debate on which is better in general, I'm asking specifically to this question. :)
I need to write a query to pull back a list of userid (uid) from a database containing 500k+ records. I'm returning just the one field, uid. I can query either our Oracle box or our MSSQL 2000 box. The query looks like this (this has not been simplied)
select uid
from employeeRec
where uid = 'abc123'
Yes, it really is that simply of a query. Where I need the tuninig help is that the uid is indexed and some uid could be (not many but some) 'ABC123' or 'abc123'. MSSQL doesn't care of the case-sensitivity whereas Oracle does. So for Oracle, my query would look like this:
select uid
from employeeRec
where lower(uid) = 'abc123'
I've learned that if you use lower on an index field in MSSQL, you render the index useless (there are ways around it but that is beyond the scope of my question here - since if I choose MSSQL, I don't need to use lower at all). I wanted to know if I choose Oracle, and use the lower() function, will that also hurt performance of the query?
I'm looping over this query about 200 times in addition to some other queries that are being run and to process the entire loop takes 1 second per iteration and I've narrowed down the slowness to this particular query. For a web page, 200 seconds seems like eternity. For you CF readers, timeout value has been increased so the page doesn't error out and there are no page errors, I'm just trying to speed up this query.
Another item to note: This database is in a different city than the other queries being run so I do expect some lag time there.
As TomTom put, your index will simply not be used by Oracle. But, you can create a function based index, and this new index will be used when you issue your query.
create index my_new_ix on employeeRec(lower(uid));
Wrapping an indexed column in a function call would have the potential to cause performance problems in Oracle. Oracle couldn't use a plain index on UID to process your query. On the other hand, you could create a function-based index on lower(uid) that would be used by the query, i.e.
CREATE INDEX case_insensitive_idx
ON employeeRec( lower( uid ) );
Note that if you want to do case-insensitive queries in general, you may be better served setting NLS parameters to force case-insensitivity. You'd still need function-based indexes on the columns you're searching on, but it can simplify your queries a bit.
I wanted to know if I choose Oracle,
and use the lower() function, will
that also hurt performance of the
query?
Yes. The perforamnce reduction is because the index is on the original value and the collation i case sensitive, so all possible values must be run through the function to filter out the ones matching.
I have been dancing around this issue for awhile but it keeps coming up. We have a system and our may of our tables start with a description that is originally stored as an NVARCHAR(150) and I then we get a ticket asking to expand the field size to 250, then 1000 etc, etc...
This cycle is repeated on ever "note" field and/or "description" field we add to most tables. Of course the concern for me is performance and breaking the 8k limit of the page. However, my other concern is making the system less maintainable by breaking these fields out of EVERY table in the system into a lazy loaded reference.
So here I am faced with these same to 2 options that have been staring me in the face. (others are welcome) please lend me your opinions.
Change all may notes and/or descriptions to NVARCHAR(MAX) and make sure we do exclude these fields in all listings. Basically never do a: SELECT * FROM [TableName] unless is it only retrieving one record.
Remove all notes and/or description fields and replace them with a forign key reference to a [Notes] table.
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Notes] (
[NoteId] [int] NOT NULL,
[NoteText] [NVARCHAR](MAX)NOT NULL )
Obviously I would prefer use option 1 because it will change so much in our system if we go with 2. However if option 2 is really the only good way to proceed, then at least I can say these changes are necessary and I have done the homework.
UPDATE:
I ran several test on a sample database with 100,000 records in it. What I find is that the because of cluster index scans the IO required for option 1 is "roughly" twice that of option 2. If I select a large number of records (1000 or more) option 1 is twice as slow even if I do not include the large text field in the select. As I request less rows the lines blur more. I a web app where page sizes of 50 or so are the norm, so option 1 will work, but I will be converting all instances to option 2 in the (very) near future for scalability.
Option 2 is better for several reasons:
When querying your tables, the large
text fields fill up pages quickly,
forcing the database to scan more
pages to retrieve data. This is
especially taxing when you don't
actually need to return the text
data.
As you mentioned, it gives you
a clean break to change the data
type in one swoop. Microsoft has
deprecated TEXT in SQL Server 2008,
so you should stick with
VARCHAR/VARBINARY.
Separate filegroups. Having
all your text data in a slower,
cheaper storage location might be
something you decide to pursue in
the future. If not, no harm, no
foul.
While Option 1 is easier for now, Option 2 will give you more flexibility in the long-term. My suggestion would be to implement a simple proof-of-concept with the "notes" information separated from the main table and perform some of your queries on both examples. Compare the execution plans, client statistics and logical I/O reads (SET STATISTICS IO ON) for some of your queries against these tables.
A quick note to those suggesting the use of a TEXT/NTEXT from MSDN:
This feature will be removed in a
future version of Microsoft SQL
Server. Avoid using this feature in
new development work, and plan to
modify applications that currently use
this feature. Use varchar(max),
nvarchar(max) and varbinary(max) data
types instead. For more information,
see Using Large-Value Data Types.
I'd go with Option 2.
You can create a view that joins the two tables to make the transition easier on everyone, and then go through a clean-up process that removes the view and uses the single table wherever possible.
You want to use a TEXT field. TEXT fields aren't stored directly in the row; instead, it stores a pointer to the text data. This is transparent to queries, though - if you ask for a TEXT field, it will return the actual text, not the pointer.
Essentially, using a TEXT field is somewhat between your two solutions. It keeps your table rows much smaller than using a varchar, but you'll still want to avoid asking for them in your queries if possible.
The TEXT/NTEXT data type has practically unlimited length while taking up next to nothing in your record.
It comes with a few strings attached, like special behavior with string functions, but for a secondary "notes/description" type of field these may be less of a problem.
Just to expand on Option 2
You could:
Rename existing MyTable to MyTable_V2
Move the Notes column into a joined Notes table (with 1:1 joining ID)
Create a VIEW called MyTable that joins MyTable_V2 and Notes tables
Create an INSTEAD OF trigger on MyTable view which saves the Notes column into the Notes table (IF NULL then delete any existing Notes row, if NOT NULL then Insert if not found, otherwise Update). Perform appropriate action on MyTable_V2 table
Note: We've had trouble doing this where there is a Computed column in MyTable_V2 (I think that was the problem, either way we've hit snags when doing this with "unusual" tables)
All new Insert/Update/Delete code should be written to operate directly on MyTable_V2 and Notes tables
Optionally: Have the INSERT OF trigger on MyTable log the fact that it was called (it can do this minimally, UPDATE a pre-existing log table row with GetDate() only if existing row's date is > 24 hours old - so will only do an update once a day).
When you are no longer getting any log records you can drop the INSTEAD OF trigger on MyTable view and you are now fully MyTable_V2 compliant!
Huge amount of hassle to implement, as you surmised.
Alternatively trawl the code for all references to MyTable and change them to MyTable_V2, put a VIEW in place of MyTable for SELECT only, and not create the INSTEAD OF trigger.
My plan would be to fix all Insert/Update/Delete statements referencing the now deprecated MyTable. For me this would be made somewhat easier because we use unique names for all tables and columns in the database, and we use the same names in all application code, so making sure I had found all instances by a simple FIND would be high.
P.S. Option 2 is also preferable if you have any SELECT * lying around. We have had clients whos application performance has gone downhill fast when they added large Text/Blob columns to existing tables - because of "lazy" SELECT * statements. Hopefully that isn;t the case in your shop though!
I have a bunch (750K) of records in one table that I have to see they're in another table. The second table has millions of records, and the data is something like this:
Source table
9999-A1B-1234X, with the middle part potentially being longer than three digits
Target table
DescriptionPhrase9999-A1B-1234X(9 pages) - yes, the parens and the words are in the field.
Currently I'm running a .net app that loads the source records, then runs through and searches on a like (using a tsql function) to determine if there are any records. If yes, the source table is updated with a positive. If not, the record is left alone.
the app processes about 1000 records an hour. When I did this as a cursor sproc on sql server, I pretty much got the same speed.
Any ideas if regular expressions or any other methodology would make it go faster?
What about doing it all in the DB, rather than pulling records into your .Net app:
UPDATE source_table s SET some_field = true WHERE EXISTS
(
SELECT target_join_field FROM target_table t
WHERE t.target_join_field LIKE '%' + s.source_join_field + '%'
)
This will reduce the total number of queries from 750k update queries down to 1 update.
First I would redesign if at all possible. Better to add a column that contains the correct value and be able to join on it. If you still need the long one. you can use a trigger to extract the data into the column at the time it is inserted.
If you have data you can match on you need neither like '%somestuff%' which can't use indexes or a cursor both of which are performance killers. This should bea set-based task if you have designed properly. If the design is bad and can't be changed to a good design, I see no good way to get good performance using t-SQl and I would attempt the regular expression route. Not knowing how many different prharses and the structure of each, I cannot say if the regular expression route would be easy or even possible. But short of a redesign (which I strongly suggest you do), I don't see another possibility.
BTW if you are working with tables that large, I would resolve to never write another cursor. They are extremely bad for performance especially when you start taking about that size of record. Learn to think in sets not record by record processing.
One thing to be aware of with using a single update (mbeckish's answer) is that the transaction log (enabling a rollback if the query becomes cancelled) will be huge. This will drastically slow down your query. As such it is probably better to proces them in blocks of 1,000 rows or such like.
Also, the condition (b.field like '%' + a.field + '%') will need to check every single record in b (millions) for every record in a (750,000). That equates to more than 750 billion string comparisons. Not great.
The gut feel "index stuff" won't help here either. An index keeps things in order, so the first character(s) dictate the position in the index, not the ones you're interested in.
First Idea
For this reason I would actually consider creating another table, and parsing the long/messy value into something nicer. An example would be just to strip off any text from the last '(' onwards. (This assumes all the values follow that pattern) This would simplify the query condition to (b.field like '%' + a.field)
Still, an index wouldn't help here either though as the important characters are at the end. So, bizarrely, it could well be worth while storing the characters of both tables in reverse order. The index on you temporary table would then come in to use.
It may seem very wastefull to spent that much time, but in this case a small benefit would yield a greate reward. (A few hours work to halve the comparisons from 750billion to 375billion, for example. And if you can get the index in to play you could reduce this a thousand fold thanks to index being tree searches, not just ordered tables...)
Second Idea
Assuming you do copy the target table into a temp table, you may benefit extra from processing them in blocks of 1000 by also deleting the matching records from the target table. (This would only be worthwhile where you delete a meaningful amount from the target table. Such that after all 750,000 records have been checked, the target table is now [for example] half the size that it started at.)
EDIT:
Modified Second Idea
Put the whole target table in to a temp table.
Pre-process the values as much as possible to make the string comparison faster, or even bring indexes in to play.
Loop through each record from the source table one at a time. Use the following logic in your loop...
DELETE target WHERE field LIKE '%' + #source_field + '%'
IF (##row_count = 0)
[no matches]
ELSE
[matches]
The continuous deleting makes the query faster on each loop, and you're only using one query on the data (instead of one to find matches, and a second to delete the matches)
Try this --
update SourceTable
set ContainsBit = 1
from SourceTable t1
join (select TargetField from dbo.TargetTable t2) t2
on charindex(t1.SourceField, t2.TargetField) > 0
First thing is to make sure you have an index for that column on the searched table. Second is to do the LIKE without a % sign on the left side. Check the execution plan to see if you are not doing a table scan on every row.
As le dorfier correctly pointed out, there is little hope if you are using a UDF.
There are lots of ways to skin the cat - I would think that first it would be important to know if this is a one-time operation, or a regular task that needs to be completed regularly.
Not knowing all the details of you problem, if it was me, at this was a one-time (or infrequent operation, which it sounds like it is), I'd probably extract out just the pertinent fields from the two tables including the primary key from the source table and export them down to a local machine as text files. The files sizes will likely be significantly smaller than the full tables in your database.
I'd run it locally on a fast machine using a routine written in something like 'C'/C++ or another "lightweight" language that has raw processing power, and write out a table of primary keys that "match", which I would then load back into the sql server and use it as a basis of an update query (i.e. update source table where id in select id from temp table).
You might spend a few hours writing the routine, but it would run in a fraction of the time you are seeing in sql.
By the sounds of you sql, you may be trying to do 750,000 table scans against a multi-million records table.
Tell us more about the problem.
Holy smoke, what great responses!
system is on disconnected network, so I can't copy paste, but here's the retype
Current UDF:
Create function CountInTrim
(#caseno varchar255)
returns int
as
Begin
declare #reccount int
select #reccount = count(recId) from targettable where title like '%' + #caseNo +'%'
return #reccount
end
Basically, if there's a record count, then there's a match, and the .net app updates the record. The cursor based sproc had the same logic.
Also, this is a one time process, determining which entries in a legacy record/case management system migrated successfully into the new system, so I can't redesign anything. Of course, developers of either system are no longer available, and while I have some sql experience, I am by no means an expert.
I parsed the case numbers from the crazy way the old system had to make the source table, and that's the only thing in common with the new system, the case number format. I COULD attempt to parse out the case number in the new system, then run matches against the two sets, but with a possible set of data like:
DescriptionPhrase1999-A1C-12345(5 pages)
Phrase/Two2000-A1C2F-5432S(27 Pages)
DescPhraseThree2002-B2B-2345R(8 pages)
Parsing that became a bit more complex so I thought I'd keep it simpler.
I'm going to try the single update statement, then fall back to regex in the clr if needed.
I'll update the results. And, since I've already processed more than half the records, that should help.
Try either Dan R's update query from above:
update SourceTable
set ContainsBit = 1
from SourceTable t1
join (select TargetField
from dbo.TargetTable t2) t2
on charindex(t1.SourceField, t2.TargetField) > 0
Alternatively, if the timeliness of this is important and this is sql 2005 or later, then this would be a classic use for a calculated column using SQL CLR code with Regular Expressions - no need for a standalone app.