Skip to main content

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:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more