The Oracle database provides a set of SQL functions to search and manipulate strings using regular expressions. These functions include REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_SUBSTR, REGEXP_INSTR, and REGEXP_REPLACE. Regular expressions use metacharacters like period, plus, star, and pipe to specify patterns to match. Metacharacters have special meanings like wildcard, repeating, or range of characters. The regular expression functions take a source string and pattern to perform matching and extraction.