SQL Server 2012 Programmability Enhancements

SQL Server 2012 supports a great programmability enhancements and functions :

T-SQL THROW Statement

Now SQL Server 2012 has improved error handling by introducing throw statement for throwing exception in T-SQL.

Conversion Functions

SQL Server 2012 has support for new conversion functions for converting numeric, date, and time values to desired format.

T-SQL built-in pagination

SQL Server 2012 also supports built-in pagination with the help of OFFSET and FETCH like MySQL.

--Suppose Employee tables has 500 records
    --Below query skip 200 rows and fetch the next 20 records
    SELECT EmpID, EmpName, Salary FROM dbo.Employee
    ORDER BY EmpID
    OFFSET 200 ROWS
    FETCH NEXT 20 ROWS ONLY 
    T-SQL Sequence</p>

SQL Server 2012 also supports sequence like Oracle database. It works like as IDENTITY field without being a field.

  --Create Sequence object
    CREATE SEQUENCE objSequence
    START WITH 1
    INCREMENT BY 1;
     --Create Employee object
    DECLARE @Employee TABLE
    (
    ID int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    FullName nvarchar(100) NOT NULL
    )
     --Insert values
    INSERT @Employee (ID, FullName)
    VALUES (NEXT VALUE FOR objSequence, 'Mohan'),
    (NEXT VALUE FOR objSequence, 'Deepak'),
    (NEXT VALUE FOR objSequence, 'Pavan');
     --Show data
    SELECT * FROM @Employee

Metadata Discovery Enhancements

SQL Server 2012 also has improved metadata discovery, which allow you to determine the shape of projected output from queries, tables, stored procedure, views, and other objects.