Once again, some important news popped up on my desktop in the Twitter client first. On Thursday, I saw a note from a friend that RC0 was out and he was downloading it.  Without more details than that, I knew that SQL Server 2012 had taken an important step forward. The Release Candidate is the feature complete version of the product, which means that everything we can expect to see in the final RTM version is in this version.

When SQL Server 2012 was announced as the PASS Summit, it was slated for a release in the first half of 2012, which had me thinking that it would not release until May when TechEd usually is held. However the fact that RC0 has come out now makes me think that we will see an RTM date earlier than that. For those of you looking to upgrade or take advantage of new features, you can get started now with your testing. 

SQL Server 2012 adds lots of features, but it also builds on many existing ones. High availability matures with the AlwaysOn technology, Resource Governor is expanded, Filetable, expanding the Filestream capabilities, and more. You can read about some overviews in the announcement, or check out Books Online. There's even a great new user-mode version of the Express edition, called LocalDB.

It's exciting to think about another version of SQL Server, and the maturation of the platform to provide even more capabilities and options for our applications. It's not perfect, and there are things I wish they would changed, but it does seem like the best relational platform out there to me.

If you are interested in some early testing of the feature complete version, you can download RC0 here.