Book Image

SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide

By : Miloš Radivojević, Dejan Sarka, William Durkin
Book Image

SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide

By: Miloš Radivojević, Dejan Sarka, William Durkin

Overview of this book

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is considered the biggest leap in the data platform history of the Microsoft, in the ongoing era of Big Data and data science. This book introduces you to the new features of SQL Server 2016 that will open a completely new set of possibilities for you as a developer. It prepares you for the more advanced topics by starting with a quick introduction to SQL Server 2016's new features and a recapitulation of the possibilities you may have already explored with previous versions of SQL Server. The next part introduces you to small delights in the Transact-SQL language and then switches to a completely new technology inside SQL Server - JSON support. We also take a look at the Stretch database, security enhancements, and temporal tables. The last chapters concentrate on implementing advanced topics, including Query Store, column store indexes, and In-Memory OLTP. You will finally be introduced to R and learn how to use the R language with Transact-SQL for data exploration and analysis. By the end of this book, you will have the required information to design efficient, high-performance database applications without any hassle.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
SQL Server 2016 Developer's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
In-Memory OLTP Improvements in SQL Server 2016

Chapter 4. Transact-SQL Enhancements

Each new SQL Server version brings numerous extensions and improvements to Transact-SQL language. Most of them are used to support newly added database engine features, but some of them address missing functionalities and limitations in previous versions. SQL Server 2016 comes up with many features that require extensions in Transact-SQL: temporal tables, JSON support, improvements for memory-optimized tables, columnstore tables and indexes, new security enhancements, and so on. They will be explored in detail in chapters dedicated to appropriate features.

This chapter covers small Transact-SQL features that can make developers' work more productive and enhancements that can increase the availability of database objects and enlarge the scope of existing functionalities, limited in the previous SQL Server versions.

This chapter is divided into the following three sections:

  • New and enhanced Transact-SQL functions and expressions

  • Enhanced DML and DDL statements...