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Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Upgrading to SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff checks out a tool built into SSMS 22:

Starting with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22, the Hybrid & Migration Component delivers a streamlined experience for upgrade assessment and side-by-side migration. This replaces the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) that retired on July 16, 2025, consolidating assessment and migration into one tool. So what are the key capabilities:

Click through for those capabilities and a few tips on how to use it. I’m not sure how clean the upgrade process is to 2025 versus standalone installation. I’d imagine that, if you’re not using something like ML Services, it’s probably fine.

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Tips for the Import Data Option in SQL Server

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword doesn’t trust wizards, with their pointy caps and long beards:

If you need to create a copy of a table in another database, the ‘Import Data’ option may seem convenient. If you’ve used this method to copy to your dev environment and found things break, this post is for you.

Click through for some solid advice on how to import that data. Another thing I would sometimes do is coerce all of the input columns to long strings and load it into a staging table. Then, I could use T-SQL to re-shape the data however I needed it rather than trying to get a finicky SSIS flow to translate this date and time combination (or whatever) appropriately.

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Extracting SSMS 21 and 22 Saved Connection Data

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea wants to keep some connections:

In this post I demo a PowerShell script that can be used to extract and decrypt SSMS 21 and 22 saved connection information.

This script builds on the one for importing saved connections from SSMS 21 to SSMS 22.
Instead of importing, it looks for any SSMS 21 and 22 related config folders, extracts the relevant connection data, decrypts it and saves it in clear text.

Click through for a link to the script, as well as an explanation of what is happening.

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Running SQL Server 2025 and SSMS in MacOS Tahoe

Published 2025-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West shares some notes:

We Apple product folks have been through a journey with the Microsoft data platform and Arm64 support, haven’t we? When the M1-based Apple silicon laptops were released, we couldn’t run Windows x64 in a virtual machine at all. Then Parallels managed to get a build of Windows 11 Arm64 going, but that meant we couldn’t run SQL Server … reliably, anyway. Some versions could install sometimes, but it was unpredictable.

It looks like neither product runs perfectly, but they both work better than I expected.

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Import SSMS 21 Saved Connections into SSMS 22

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea digs in:

I wasn’t really planning on writing a blog post today, but I got curios if there’s anyway in which connections saved in SQL Server Management Studio 21 can be migrated in SSMS 22.

If you’ve installed SQL Server Management Studio 22 you may have noticed that the saved connection details weren’t migrated over from SSMS 21.

It’s documented in the list of known issues for SSMS 22 and marked as having no workaround.

Vlad builds a workaround, probably wearing a lab coat and fiddling with Bunsen burners and beakers full of oddly-colored liquids.

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Parallel Performance and SSMS Outputs

Published 2025-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish looks at some execution plans:

Getting back to the query, it doesn’t look that offensive to me. The row mode sort is a parallel top N sort and the overall number of rows to return is low, so each thread can independently sort its rows and return 1000 locally sorted rows to the parent operator. This is about as good as it gets with parallel row mode sorting. This is a row mode only query so the operator times that you see are the sum of that operator’s work and its children. In terms of real work done by the query, the scan clocks in at 1.168 seconds and the sort clocks in at 0.84 seconds. The final accounting at the end by the parent Parallelism (Gather Streams) is misleading at best and an outright LIE at worst. There wasn’t 4 seconds of work done by this query. There was only 2 seconds. 

Joe looks at two separate things in this post: first, a way of trying to optimize OFFSET/FETCH style paging queries; and second, how the gather streams parallel operator can report wrong information.

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SSMS 22 now Generally Available

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff shares the news:

Microsoft has announced that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22 is now generally available! This latest release brings powerful new capabilities to enhance your SQL Server experience:

Click through to see what’s new and see the original Microsoft blog post on the topic. One thing to note is that the query hint recommendation tool is still in preview, so you do need to select it as an individual component to install.

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Database Scoped Configurations in SSMS

Published 2025-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low takes a peek at something fairly new to SQL Server Management Studio:

But users were only an early part of this story. Whether you want users contained or not, there are so many configurations at the server level that people wanted to be able to configure at each database, instead of only at the server. So, we saw the introduction of Database Scoped Configurations.

What was missing from this was a UI for setting them. 

Read on to see how that has changed.

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Changing the Border Color of SSMS Grid Results

Published 2025-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low lightens things up a bit:

As soon as I started working with a recent version of SSMS, I realized that I didn’t like how heavy the grid lines were in the output:

I really wanted the data to be the focus, not the lines. They seemed much darker than on the previous versions. Note that this is a personal preference. I can imagine some people preferring them as they now are. Fortunately, though, you can now change the color of the lines. 

Click through to see how.

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