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SQL Server 2012: Nice features for developers

I finally found some time to have a look at SQL Server 2012. There is still a lot to discover but I already want to highlight 2 great new features:
Sequence Objects

It’s a feature I already know from Oracle, but now SQL Server finally supports Sequence Objects too. A sequence object generates sequence of unique numeric values. It’s a nice alternative if you don’t want to use Identity fields or want to get a unique number up front.

Here is a sample that creates a sequence that starts with 1 and gets incremented by 1. The minimum value is 0 and maximum value is 100. If you go higher that 100 an error is thrown(if you don’t want this you can change this by specifying ‘cycle’ instead of  ‘no cycle’.

To increment the value we need to call the statement below:

Pagination

Another nice features that got added to SQL Server 2012 is the built-in support for pagination. Before I had to combine “ROW_NUMBER and “TOP” to get a subset of results. Now I can use  “OFFSET” and “FETCH’ commands to do pagination.

To skip the first 10 results and take the next 10 results from a Products table, I can write the following query:

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