I finally got around to installing SQL Server 2012 RC 0 on VMware Fusion 4 yesterday. Like a kid on Christmas, I started looking for the enhancements that do not get much marketing attention, but will improve my development workflow or put an end to some administration pains.
This is what I found so far:
- LocalDB
- Sequences
- SQL users without Instance logins
- File Tables
- THROW statement
- Support for up to 15,000 partitions
- Columnstore indexes
- User-defined server roles
- Default schemas for a Windows NT Group
- ad-hoc query paging for SELECT statements
- Support for importing and exporting Spatial data types natively using the SSMS Import/Export utility. For those of you wondering, this is a SSMS client enhancement and in my testing export/import of spatial tables worked between two SQL 2008 R2 databases where it would error on any table containing a spatial data type using the SSMS 2008 R2 client. Thank you SQL Dev Team.
New Functions:
Conversion functions
Date and time functions
- DATEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
- DATETIME2FROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
- DATETIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
- DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
- EOMONTH (Transact-SQL)
- SMALLDATETIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
- TIMEFROMPARTS (Transact-SQL)
Logical functions
String functions
Analytic functions
Still wishing for:
- ALTER TYPE – Am I the only one that uses TVPs? Changing the database schema when using TVPs is a dependency nightmare and a mess to deploy the change. VS Ultimate helps, but I will always have reservations with making a change to objects, e.g., all the stored procedures dependent on the TVP, that are not actually having a code change. Please SQL Dev Team, consider prioritizing a usability enhancement for TVPs in the first service pack or R2.
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