Some new features in SQL Server 2012 that looked interesting to me:

Distributed Replay:
Distributed Replay – BOL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff878183(v=sql.110).aspx
A tool similar to Profiler, it can replay workloads from multiple computers.

Statistical Semantic Search:
Semantic Search – BOL
Similar to full-text search, it allows the user to query documents to find key phrases and then find related content based on meaning.
Semantic Functions – Returns a table, which includes a score, which is a value from 0.0 to 1.0 to measure similarity, with 1.0 being a perfect score.
SEMANTICKEYPHRASETABLE – Returns a table of key phrases of a document.
SEMANTICSIMILARITYTABLE – Return a table for documents whose content is semantically similar to a specified document.
SEMANTICSIMILARITYDETAILSTABLE – Returns a table of key phrases common t a source document and a matched document.

Containment Type:
Containment Type – BOL
A database can have its metadata stored within the database. For example, the database users can be created without being linked to a SQL login and is authenticated at the database level.

At the instance level, the ‘Enable Contained Databases’ property must be set to true in order to create a contained database.

When creating a new database on an instance you can select a Containment Type of ‘None’ or ‘Partial’.