Can’t decide between cranberry sauce or mashed potatoes for your side dish? Consider Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2012 instead, which brings these hot fixins:

Update for dm_exec_query_stats to track memory grants – adds a whole new set of fields to the DMV!

New query memory grant options available (min_grant_percent and max_grant_percent) – yes, new query hint options to specify RAM for a query! )

) Access violation occurs when you enable TDE

Improved diagnostics for query plans with residual predicate pushdown

Spatial performance improvements

DBCC CHECKDB/CHECKTABLE performance improvements

Stalled dispatcher system dump forces failover

Improvements for AlwaysOn Lease Timeout

Improved tempdb spill diagnostics in the plan and XE

These are pretty doggone big improvements to go out in a service pack. Check out the full list of fixes.