Instead of looping, you can compile everything into one simple regex, like so: 
my $pattern = qr/\b(create|delete|insert|update|drop)\b/;

[download]

This gave me roughly a 3.5x performance increase over the loop method. It should be trivial to convert that to using an external file.

In reply to Re: speeding up a regex by kwaping
in thread speeding up a regex by Anonymous Monk

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