As with every new major milestone, one of the first things I do is check out what has changed under the covers. Since RC0 was released yesterday, I've been poking around at some of the DMV and other system changes. Here is what I have noticed: New objects in RC0 that weren't in CTP3Quick summary: We see a bunch of new aggregates for use with ...

If you have access to both a CTP3 instance and a CTP1 instance, and the CTP3 instance can see the CTP1 instance, you can run all of these queries simply by creating a linked server on the CTP3 instance that references the CTP1 instance (and be sure to run in the context of master). I named this linked server ''OlderCTP'' so you will see that ...

If you're not OCD about prefixing every single column in a query, this is one that might bite you. Today you might have code that assumes that, because database_id is in sys.dm_exec_requests but not in sys.dm_exec_sessions, you don't need to prefix database_id in the following example:SELECT TOP (1)   s.session_id,   ...