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.