Aaron Bertrand has a series of Connect items of interest:
There are so many active Connect items, it’s difficult to choose just one, but after spending some time looking at the
generate_seriesfunction in PostgreSQL, the one at the top of my list right now is this suggestion from Erland Sommarskog (blog):Connect #258733 : Add a built-in table of numbers
I think it would be cheap and easy for SQL Server to provide a defaut table of numbers, always in memory, just like any other catalog view or DMV. This thing can use compression now, regardless of edition, so even a table with 2 billion rows will only take 13 MB, and should be easy to populate either at start-up or on first use. I could list out all of the potential uses for a numbers table, but they’re fairly well documented in the following sources (and most use cases don’t need anywhere near 2 billion values, so maybe the range could be defined using a
sys.configurationsor database-levelSCOPED CONFIGURATIONsetting)
Click through for additional Connect items, and please vote on any Connect items which catch your eye.