Abhiman Tiwari announces a new function and a new operator:
We are excited to announce that the UNISTR intrinsic function and ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) are now available in public preview in Azure SQL Database. The UNISTR function allows you to escape Unicode characters, making it easier to work with international text. The ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) provides a simple and intuitive way to combine characters or binary strings. These new features will enhance your ability to manipulate and work with text data.
Click through to learn more about both. Honestly, I’d rather stick with CONCAT() versus using || because of how CONCAT() handles NULL without me having to check every operand first.