I dunno about you, but I got a big stocking full of coal. Next year, I’m gonna be better, and I plan on asking Santa for a whole bunch of Connect requests. For T-SQL Tuesday, I asked you to name your favorite SQL Server bugs & enhancement requests, and here’s what you want in your stocking next year.

If you agree with a feature, click on it, and upvote its Connect request. These bloggers took the time to make their case – now it’s time for you to vote.

Export/import SQL Server settings – Rich Benner blew me away with this idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to simply export all your settings when you need to build a new server and make sure it’s consistent with the old one?

A query hint to force parallelism – James Anderson wants a supported hint that would do the same thing as the unsupported trace flag 8649, and I am intrigued by his idea, and would like to subscribe to his newsletter.

Track last-used-dates for objects – Wayne Sheffield wants it. You want it. I want it. This would be awesome.

Turn off Enterprise features in Developer Edition – Mark Southall echoes something I’ve heard so many times from DBAs who want their developers to avoid features they can’t deploy in production. Yes, this is less necessary in 2016 SP1 – but there’s still a few reasons, and a lot of people who aren’t on 2016 SP1.

Add a numbers table – Adam Machanic Aaron Bertrand asked for something that would make advanced T-SQL a whole lot easier to write (and especially more consistent across different servers.) He also included a few honorable mentions, plus his favorite resolved Connect items.

String or binary data would be truncated – Denis Gobo is as sick of this stupid error message as I am, and I’ve upvoted this Connect suggestion before. So necessary. And for bonus points, Lori Edwards wrote about the exact same thing!

Indexed view insertion bugs – Wow, until I read Shane O’Neill’s post, I had no idea these bugs existed, and it scares me a little. OK, maybe a lot. Hold me.

Play a sound while waiting for SSMS – Tom Roush is an optimist who brings joy to others, as do his Connect requests.

Faster query execution with batch mode – Koen Verbeeck talks about Itzik’s slick trick to use columnstore-style execution to make rowstore queries go faster, and asks to get a non-hacky workaround.

Retaining history of dropped columns in temporal tables – I think temporal tables stand a chance of being one of the coolest features in 2016 over time, and Randolph West points to a great idea to make ’em even better.

Unsigned integers – One of my favorite new bloggers, Ewald Cress, managed to work in a Zoolander reference. Bonus points. Enough bonus points, in fact, that he needs numbers larger than integers to track them.

Extended Events live data view gets behind – Dave Mason warns you about the first issue you’re likely to run into when you’re playing with XE for the first time.

Fixing a bug with columnstore indexes and filtered indexes – Any blog post that has a stack dump is fun to me, even if I haven’t been using these two features often.

Database-level wait stats – Arun wants to bring this feature down from the cloud. I totally understand that it’d be hard to code, but…we went to the moon, right? Also, I want a pony.

Sorting a stacked Power BI chart – Looking at Melissa Connors’ example, I would probably bet one crispy taco that this will be the first item in this list that actually gets fixed.

Always On recovery pending bug – Muthukkumaran Kaliyamoorthy got bit by what sounds like a really funny AG bug. (He might beat Melissa in speed-to-fix, come to think of it.)

Native multi-tenant support – One database, multiple clients with the same tables, but kept separated by the engine. I love Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan’s optimism, but I think Tom Roush’s request is likely to get fulfilled first.

MSBuild support in SSIS – Automated deployment is getting more mainstream these days, and Jeroen Janssen wants to make it easier.

SSRS “while-loading” page – Ryan McCauley wants to customize the page users see before their report loads, and show them useful information about the report. I love it.

Subfolders in SSRS – I’m not sure if Bert Wagner is trolling me, because it seems impossible that this hasn’t happened after 7 years of requests.

Estimated Number of Rows to be Read – Rob Farley wants to see this property added to the execution plan tooltips.

Named function parameters – Instead of just passing in a list of values, Riley Major makes a great case for why you should pass the names in too. He won me over.

Padded strings – No, not just with spaces, but for example a string of leading zeroes for zip codes. Christian Gräfe won me over with that Oracle idea.

Add included columns to sp_helpindex – Kenneth Fisher, buddy, pal. One word: sp_BlitzIndex. At least I think that’s one word.

SQL Server on Raspberry Pi systems – Winning post in the category of “Highest Licensing Exposure for Smallest Performance Gain.”

RowCreateTime, RowModifiedTime, RowModifiedUserName fields – Louis Davidson opined that SQL Server should automatically update these columns. It’d be really useful for change detection. This one’s my favorite – in fact, I’m such a huge fan of this that my own T-SQL Tuesday post was about a different Connect request with the same goal.

Updates After the Publication:

IntelliSense for MDX – Jens Vestergaard wrote a post, but forgot to link back here, so we didn’t know about it. I like the idea though!

Storing & accessing Query Store data – Erin Sstellato wants to put it somewhere other than PRIMARY, and export it from the database.

Lots of stuff – Adam Machanic put together a whole wish list for developer ease-of-use.

Whew! That was a ton of fun. Wanna host your own T-SQL Tuesday? Check out the rules and email amachanic at gmail dot com – he’d love to have you, and it’s a great way to meet new bloggers, spark inspiration, and get other people reading your blog.