New programming features in SQL 2012

SQL Server 2012 is released this weekend.  SQL 2012, you can now use select-style statements to return customized results from a single stored procedure. 

EXEC uspGetEmployeeManagers 16 WITH RESULT SETS ( ([Reporting Level] int NOT NULL, [ID of Employee] int NOT NULL, [Employee First Name] nvarchar(50) NOT NULL, [Employee Last Name] nvarchar(50) NOT NULL, [Employee ID of Manager] nvarchar(max) NOT NULL, [Manager First Name] nvarchar(50) NOT NULL, [Manager Last Name] nvarchar(50) NOT NULL ) );

EXECUTE (Transact-SQL)

Custom paging using an ORDER BY clause

-- Skip 0 rows and return only the first 10 rows from the sorted result set. SELECT DepartmentID, Name, GroupName FROM HumanResources.Department ORDER BY DepartmentID OFFSET 0 ROWS FETCH NEXT 10 ROWS ONLY;

Database sequence numbers

Throw to negate the need for custom messages with RAISERROR

C#/VB style Format to format dates, times, numbers

CONCAT to join 2 strings

OVER clause for windowed summarization / rolling totals

PARSE to convert strings to dates, currencies, etc

TRY_CONVERT to avoid errors when converting data types

TRY_PARSE to determine if strings = data types

DATEFROMPARTS to take a year, month and day and create a date

CHOOSE to return an index item from a list of selections. (Arrays in SQL?)

IIF for fast conditional checks.