Improvements in SQL Server 2008's INSERT statement

For a long, long time, the syntax of the INSERT SQL statement has been pretty much stationary, and SQL Server hasn't been an exception. Surely, SQL Server has its own non-standard additions just like Oracle, DB2, and Progress, but overall, the syntax is pretty standardized.

However, the latest version of SQL Server 2008 brings a new feature to the INSERT statement: the ability to insert multiple rows in a single SQL statement. This feature is officially called "Transact-SQL Row Constructors".

With this new feature, you could run INSERT statements like this in SQL Server 2008:

INSERT INTO customers
VALUES (1, 'J. Doe'),
       (2, 'O. Osborne'),
       (3, 'M. Gibbs')

Naturally, such statements would fail on SQL Server 2005 and older, giving an error message about invalid syntax. But, if you are (going to, as the current release is the candidate RC0) running the latest 2008 version, then this addition sounds cool to me in its own right.