Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

Last week, Microsoft held a virtual conference to announce the availability of SQL Server 2012. The conference included a number of events (speakers, videos, training activities, etc.) that focused on the new functionality available in this release. Now that most of the fanfare has died down a bit, I'd like to take a look at what some of that new functionality means for PHP developers. Combined with the release of the Microsoft Driver for SQL Server for PHP, I think the SQL Server 2012 release makes some big improvements in developing PHP/SQL Server applications.

He includes instructions on getting the latest version set up with the SQL Server Express LocalDB (and command line tools). He mentions only a few of the new things this latest version has to offer - easier pagination with OFFSET/FETCH NEXT, client-side cursors and other things like "AlwaysOn Connectivity" and the PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES constant.