New and Enhanced Features - SQL Server 2012 (What's New in SQL Server 2012) - Part 6

Web Access Enhancement

In the wave of SQL Server 2012 investments, Microsoft is excited to open up the SQL Server data platform even further with expanded interoperability support through new tools which allow customers to modernize their infrastructure while maximizing existing investments, extending virtually any data anywhere.

1.     JDBC 4.0 Driver: The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 4.0 is a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 4.0 compliant driver that provides robust data access to SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Azure.

2.     UTF - 16: This encoding stores the basic Unicode characters using single 16 bit units and others characters using two 16 bit units. 

UTF-16 is the primary encoding mechanism used by Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. On the other hand SQL server 2000 uses the UCS-2 encoding schema to store Unicode data.

UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding for Unicode capable of encoding 1,112,064 numbers (called code points) in the Unicode code space from 0 to 0x10FFFF. It produces a variable-length result of either one or two 16-bit code units per code point.

The older UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a similar character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996. It produces a fixed-length format by simply using the code point as the 16-bit code unit and produces exactly the same result as UTF-16 for 97% of all the code points in the range 0-0xFFFF, including all characters that had been assigned a value at that time.

3.     PHP Driver: Coupled with the SQL Server 2012 release, this latest PHP driver makes some big improvements in developing PHP/SQL Server applications.

The newly supported SQL Server 2012 features include Buffered Queries and SQL Server AlwaysOn - encompassing support for Multi-Subnet Failover, access to Availability Groups and Read-Only Routing - and support for SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB.

To learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16/UCS-2

4.       Support for ARM Processors: ARM was an acronym for Advanced RISC Machine, and now SQL Server 2012 support for this.

5.      Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client (SNAC): This native client (SNAC) is a single dynamic-link library (DLL) containing both the SQL Server OLE DB provider and SQL Server ODBC driver. The SNAC driver ships with SQL Server 2012 and contains features such as support for AlwaysOn, SQL Server Express LocalDB, enhanced support for SQL Azure and performance improvements for developers.