SQLServer 2012 – New Features Useful for Developers

SQL Server 2012 have included varied improvements and great features in the form of new tools, coding and programmability enhancements, and even new improvements to the underlying SQL Server engine for developers. Some of the advantages are as follows:

Multi Monitor Support

• SSMS 2012 picks up Visual Studio 2010's vastly improved multi-monitor support.

Snippets

•  SSMS 2012's snippets feature is a significant productivity boon for developers.
•  SSMS 2012 provides the ability to leverage code snippets within SSMS. This capability is something that has been lacking within Visual Studio over the past half-decade. SSMS snippets are injected by means of pulling up a snippets "menu" that can be accessed via the Edit, IntelliSense, Insert Snippet menu option -- or via a similar Surround With menu option.
• Both of these menu options, of course, can be accessed via hotkeys (Ctrl+K, X and Ctrl+K, S), and the existing library of snippets available is quite large and helpful out of the box.
•  When it comes to customizing and managing snippets, the Tools, Code Snippets Manager option provides paths to existing snippets along with the option to add or remove snippets as needed.

Improvements for Visual Studio 2010

• A significant tooling change for developers is that with SQL Server 2012 is now BIDS ceases to exist
• BIDS was always a source of unending frustration for developers who wanted to do .NET development and manage any form of BI (or SS*S) projects as well -- simply because of all of the versioning problems that continued to plague BIDS throughout its history.

This retirement means that it's now possible with SQL Server 2012 to directly create and manage all BI-related projects directly within Visual Studio 2010. With this there is some bad news as well.. the bad news is that age-old compatibility problems still exist in the sense that if you want support for managing BI-related projects in Visual Studio 2010, you have to uninstall Visual Studio (if it's already installed) and then re-install it after you install SQL Server 2012. However, an easier way to get BI-related project templates is to just install SSDT.

Programmability Enhancements

T-SQL gets a THROW statement –

 For SQL Server developers, the lack of a T-SQL THROW statement has always been difficult. SQL Server 2012 has addressed this lack—Howevrer,  there are a number of limitations as to how this statement can be used. Likewise, as cool as this new feature is, just remember that RAISERROR (despite its archaic spelling) still provides a number of powerful features that THROW (and PRINT) simply don't offer

T-SQL finally supports built-in pagination

• SQL Server 2012 finally introduces full-blown, first-class support within T-SQL for pagination, as shown in below Figure.
• Note, pagination is technically a feature or argument of the ORDER BY clause -- and that Microsoft actually recommends using OFFSET and FETCH as a replacement for TOP. 

Figure: Built-in pagination with support for OFFSET and FETCH via the ORDER BY clause

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Support for sequences- Another new feature that SQL Server 2012 provides is support for sequences. A sequence can best be described as being a bit like an IDENTITY "object" because it behaves just like an IDENTITY column without actually being a column. Developers can create sequences, query them for one or more IDs (which are returned in sequence), and then do whatever they want with those supplied IDs prior to INSERTing them into a table that needs a unique, sequentially incrementing, identity value, as shown in Figure

Figure: Example of a simple sequence in operation 
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Discontinued and Deprecated Features

Of course, with every new release of SQL Server, there are also a few features and bits of syntax that are either removed outright or are slated for later removal. Happily, with SQL Server 2012, the list of deprecated and removed features is relatively small. This, in turn, means that SQL Server 2012 does a great job of providing developers with new features -- with very little worry or concern for negative problems of backward compatibility.

About Author:

Dhairut Dholakia is technology lover and is important part of Systems Plus technology Think Tank. He works in systems Plus and actively contributes to technology. He can be contacted at: dhairut.d@spluspl.com