Querying SQL Server 2012 is PASS

Just finished the 70-461 Exam "Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012" and fortunately it was a (comfortable) PASS.

Much of the topics is something I have used extensively before, but these items are more or less new for me and I am happy to know a bit more now:

• OFFSET-FETCH
• APPLY
• Pivoting and unpivoting data
• Common table expressions (covered in this previous post)
• Windows functions (eg. PARTITION, OVER, ROW_NUMBER())
• Full-text data
• XML queries
• The MERGE statement
• OUTPUT-clauses for INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE.
• TRY-CATCH error handling
• Extended events

So now I have begun on this book:

 The exercises in this book requires no less than six Windows 2008 R2 servers (one DC, 4 ordinary servers and 1 server core), so the first step will be to punish my ESXi by creating this setup.