I've been playing more with T-SQL this year, doing some testing and development in various places. I've been trying to improve my skills, and keeping up with the advancements the language has made in the last few versions. Like many of you, if I haven't had the need for a particular feature, or the chance to implement it, I haven't done much with it.
I think that's the case with many people, who may not catch all the changes in T-SQL with new versions, especially if you upgrade after a year or two and don't often do more than refactor the existing code you have in production. In the spirit of improving skills, and also learning more about how others work in this profession, I want to ask you:
Have you used any of these T-SQL items in production code?
- APPLY
- THROW
- LAG/LEAD
- a tally table
- symmetric or asymmetric keys
- TRY..CONVERT
- CONCAT/FORMAT
- IIF
- SEQUENCE
Some of these have been around for a long time, some are new in SQL Server 2012, but they are all improvements beyond the core T-SQL language that I see so many people posting and asking questions about.
Let us know this week if you've used any of these constructs, and if you can, how they solve a problem that you struggled with in the past, or maybe how these new features have improved performance or sped up code development.
