A few days ago I wrote that I had learned about some of the new goodies in SQL Server 2008 that would be of interest to developers after watching Rick Dyess’ video, What about Developers? SQL Server 2008 and the Development Environment”

It must have been a busy day last December when another similarly enlightening email arrived in my inbox. Michael Campbell wrote a post for .NET Briefing entitled “SQL Server 2008: What’s New for Developers?”

Surprisingly there’s only a small overlap between the features that Rick highlights and those which Michael highlights, which means I get to learn more stuff! 🙂

While I have this in my inbox, I can’t find the post anywhere on the originating blog on the WindowsDevPro website, so I’ll highlight the things Michael wrote about:

The MERGE statement in t-sql lets you provide data for the database without having to predetermine if it’s an insert or an update. Today you first have to query to see if the primary key exists or not. If not, do an Insert, otherwise do an update. Very cool.

Table-Valued parameters lets you pass shaped data as parameters to a stored procedure. Cool again, or as Michaeal calls it, “wicked”.

While Rick also talked about the HierarchyID, Michael pointed out something interesting about it: “What’s cool, or interesting, about this data type though, is that it’s an intrinsic CLR data-type – meaning that Microsoft is starting to leverage Common Language Runtime functionality natively. I wonder what other CLR additions we’ll see in the future.”

Intellisense, though I’m already a big fan of Red-Gate’s SQL Prompt, which constantly saves me from having to go poke around tables that I haven’t worked with in eons before I start building my queries, not to mention the help wiht operators and functions. I wonder how the built in Intellisense compares?

GROUPING SETS which work with teh GROUP BY clause to simplify grouping that you might otherwise perform by using a UNION ALL clause on a bunch of GROUP BY clauses.

XXL User Defined Data Types (the XXL is my term, not official). UDDTs can exceed 8000 bytes.

Thanks Mikey! 🙂

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