Usually when I've had to use cross/outer apply it's been to work around overly normalized, and somewhat bad data.
Agreed on range types.. proper enums in T-SQL would be nice too. I'm really liking where PL/v8 is going, and would like to see something similar in MS-SQL server as well.. the .Net extensions are just too much of a pain to do much with. It's be nice to have a syntax that makes working with custom data types, or even just JSON and XML easier.
If PostgreSQL adds built-in replication to the Open-Source version that isn't a hacky add-on, and has failover similar to, for example MongoDB's replica sets, I'm so pushing pg for most new projects.
Maria/MySQL seem to be getting interesting as well. Honestly, I like MS-SQL until the cost of running it gets a little wonky (Azure pricing going from a single instance to anything that can have replication for example). Some of Amazon's offerings are really getting compelling here.
Agreed on range types.. proper enums in T-SQL would be nice too. I'm really liking where PL/v8 is going, and would like to see something similar in MS-SQL server as well.. the .Net extensions are just too much of a pain to do much with. It's be nice to have a syntax that makes working with custom data types, or even just JSON and XML easier.
If PostgreSQL adds built-in replication to the Open-Source version that isn't a hacky add-on, and has failover similar to, for example MongoDB's replica sets, I'm so pushing pg for most new projects.
Maria/MySQL seem to be getting interesting as well. Honestly, I like MS-SQL until the cost of running it gets a little wonky (Azure pricing going from a single instance to anything that can have replication for example). Some of Amazon's offerings are really getting compelling here.