Each new SQL Server version brings numerous extensions and improvements to the Transact-SQL language. Most of them are used to support newly added database engine features, but some of them address missing functionalities and limitations in previous versions. SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017 come up with many features that require extensions in Transact-SQL: temporal tables, JSON support, improvements for memory-optimized tables, columnstore tables and indexes, new security enhancements, graph databases, and more. They will be explored in detail in the chapters dedicated to the appropriate features.
This chapter covers Transact-SQL features that can make a developer's work more productive and ...
