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

Enhanced DML and DDL statements


In this section, you will explore enhancements in Data Manipulation Language (DML) and Data Definition Language (DDL) that are not part of new features or improved features from previous SQL Server versions.

The section starts with a small syntax extension that you will use often in the code examples in this book.

The conditional DROP statement (DROP IF EXISTS)

With a conditional DROP statement, you can avoid getting an exception if the object you want to drop does not exist. If, for instance, the T1 table has already been removed or it was not created at all, the following statement will fail:

DROP TABLE dbo.T1; 

Here is the error message:

Msg 3701, Level 11, State 5, Line 5
Cannot drop the table 'dbo.T1', because it does not exist or you do not have permission.

SQL Server 2016 introduces the conditional DROP statement for most of the database objects. The conditional DROP statement is a DROP statement extended with the IF EXISTS part. Repeat the preceding...