This full-day workshop will get you up to speed on powerful features in SQL Server geared for developers. You'll rip through the most important SQL Server programmability points in this intensive demo-packed tour, including the latest capabilities introduced with SQL Server 2016.

Part 1: T-SQL Features: The workshop starts with the many enhancements made to T-SQL. You'll learn how to use table-valued parameters to marshal entire sets of rows across the network from client to server, and how to pass them between your stored procedures and UDFs. You'll find out about MERGE, a powerful DML statement that combines the capabilities of four (or more) separate operations, and INSERT OVER DML, which enhances your ability to capture change data from the OUTPUT clause of any DML statement. You'll also work with the various date and time data types, which include support for time zone awareness. Then you'll learn about the latest T-SQL windowing (OVER clause) enhancements, running and sliding aggregates, 22 new functions, the THROW statement, server-side paging, the SEQUENCE object, and DIE (drop if exists).

Part 2: What's New in SQL Server 2016: During the next segment, you'll explore many of the latest features introduced in SQL Server 2016. You'll discover new security features such as dynamic data masking, row-level security, and always encrypted. Other innovative capabilities include "stretch" database (which lets select tables in an on-premises database transparently relocate to an Azure SQL database), temporal data (which allows "time travel" to access data as it existed at any point in time), and integrated JSON support. You'll also learn about In-Memory OLTP (aka Hekaton), and the new improvements in SQL Server 2016 that help you achieve performance gains of up to 30 times by identifying those tables that can improve performance simply by implementing them as memory-optimized tables in the database.

Part 3: Beyond Relational: In this final segment, you'll examine the powerful "beyond relational" features, and start thinking outside the box with respect to the types of data you can manage with a relational database system. You'll learn about the new built-in JSON support in SQL Server 2016, and dig into FILESTREAM and FileTable and discover how you can enjoy the native ability to store large binary objects in the file system. You'll also learn about geospatial data types that help you integrate location-intelligence into the database and build several location-aware applications on top of these new data types, including a Bing Maps mash-up. You'll learn a ton of new SQL Server features in this information-packed day.