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SQL Server 2012: New Features for Developers

Just few days back I have started to work with SQL Server 2012, here I am writing about some of the new features of SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2012 does not come with earth-shaking changes but comes with performance improvements, feature improvements and some new features. SQL Server 2012 also brings many new features to the T-SQL language, some of them are listed in this post.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012: SSMS 2012 packs a number of powerful productivity benefits that developers who use SSMS for development tasks will end up loving.  The most obvious change is to Management Studio is that it’s built on Visual Studio 2010(and it has same theme as in figure.) and has the same engine as Visual Studio which means you get a nice WPF experience, better font rendering and CTRL-scroll quick zoom-in/zoom-out.

Being built on Visual Studio 2010 also means that SSMS 2012 picks up Visual Studio 2010's vastly improved multi-monitor support.
SSMS 2012 inherits Visual Studio's Clipboard buffer. This means that you can cycle through previously copied text by holding down the Shift key while pressing Ctrl+V.

Columnstore Indexes: This is a cool new feature that is completely unique to SQL Server. They are special type of read-only index designed to be use with Data Warehouse queries. Basically, data is grouped and stored in a flat, compressed column index, greatly reducing I/O and memory utilization on large queries.

TRY_CONVERT(): TRY_CONVERT is new T-SQL function which returns a value cast to the specified data type if the cast succeeds; otherwise, returns null. You can explore detailed description and example in this post.

Paging : Paging got simpler with SQL Server 2012. Many web applications use paging to show 10 or 50 rows per page and allow the user to scroll through each page of results rather than download the entire set. In SQL Server 2012 the T-SQL syntax has been updated introducing keywords that facilitate a simpler and more efficient paging, keywords such as OFFSET, FETCH, NEXT ROWS and ONLY.  While it doesn’t provide significant performance improvements over the tedious CTE solutions we use today, it certainly makes the code easier to write.

FORMAT() : As its name implies, the FORMAT() function used to make formatting easier, FORMAT() is clearly a much more scalable approach to formatting strings, and is one of the T-SQL enhancements in Denali.  Check out here for more detail with example.

New Logical Functions: There are the two new logical functions in SQL Server 2012: (IIF andCHOOSE)

Sequence: A sequence is a user-defined schema bound object that generates a sequence of numeric values according to the specification with which the sequence was created. Please explore more about Sequence.

File Table: Typically a CMS or some other type of website will allow users to upload pictures, documents etc. Common scenario to save as binary content in the database or other approach would be to store the files on the disk and store related data (filename, extension, length, path etc.), in DB.

SQL Server 2012 offers you the filetable feature. This is a solution built upon the FILESTREAM feature which means storing the binary data outside of the MDF (Main Data File) of the database in order to avoid degrading the performance of the typical structured data. The major benefit of FileTable is it has Windows API compatibility for file data stored within an SQL Server database. With FileTable feature now we can have non-transactional access to files stored in the DB as a windows share along with transactional access via T-SQL. I'll write more about this feature in separate post. You can also check here for more details. 

Happy Programming!!!
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