A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
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.
Leave a CommentGreg 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.
Leave a CommentGreg 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.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar tries out a new feature of SQL Server Management Studio:
The maximum tuning time defaults to 300 seconds, but I tacked on a couple zeroes because my slow query already took ~20 seconds to run on its own, and I wanted to give the wizard time to wave his little wand around. The tool actually runs your query repeatedly with different hints, so if you have a 5-minute query, you’ll need to give the tool more time.
Click Start, and it begins running your query with different hints. A couple minutes later, I got:
Brent’s review is quite positive, in a “This is way better than the alternative of doing nothing” sense.
Comments closedRecently, I had to export some query results to CSV and Excel. One of the columns was extremely large query text which was defined as NVARCHAR(MAX). Here are some of the issues I faced with this request and how I over came them.
SSIS or the Import/Export wizard is fine. This is also a good use case for bcp or writing your own query using dbatools and outputting the results to file.
Comments closedReitse Eskens tries out the new preview of SQL Server Management Studio 22:
We’re almost used to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21, and now 22 is already in preview. So, let’s see where it’s available for download, install it and see what’s different.
There’s not a huge amount of new functionality, and Reitse spends some time on the big one: that SSMS is moving from the Azure OpenAI integration that they introduced in SSMS 21 to a GitHub Copilot integration in 22, but it’s not in the preview just yet.
Comments closedGarry Bargsley makes a connection:
Oh no.. my number one troubleshooting tool is not usable. Time to fire up a command prompt and connect via DAC, right?
Well, not so fast.
During a recent technical interview, I was introduced to a clever workaround that lets you connect to a distressed SQL Server using SSMS, even when it seems unresponsive.
Read on to see how you can connect without SSMS performing a bunch of background queries to retrieve data that end up using tempdb, and then resolve the issue.
Comments closedRandolph West clears up a few misconceptions about SQL Server Management Studio 21’s installer:
There’s been some confusion lately about the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installation process for version 21.
Before Microsoft released SSMS 21, you had to download an installer file for each release (ever since SSMS was released as a standalone product with v16). This file eventually grew to be over 1GB, which is a significant download, especially in the case of a minor update.
With SSMS 21, Microsoft changed SSMS to use the Visual Studio installer.
Read on to learn more about the ramifications of this decision. And there is still a way to install SSMS 21 in a secure environment without outbound internet access, although it does require a few more steps in addition to “download executable and then deploy executable to other machines.”
Comments closedI have a proper blog post coming out tomorrow for T-SQL Tuesday, but today, celebrate with me that SSMS 21 finally, at long last, fixes the irritating fact that the New Session window in SSMS for Extended Events always opened to the wrong size.
Click through for an example of the bug and how SSMS 21 fixes things. This type of bug is particularly pernicious because there aren’t scroll bars or any sort of indicator that some additional functionality exists, so unless you know that it’s there, you won’t know to look for it.
Comments closedRich Benner has some thoughts on configuration:
By default, SSMS does not show row numbers next to your code. That’s not a huge issue when working with smaller blocks of T-SQL. However, when working with larger problems and/or collaborating with colleagues, being able to refer to a row number is invaluable. This is especially important for us here at SQL Solutions Group when we’re in meetings and looking at code. Being able to refer to a line number on somebody else’s screen makes the world so much easier and less confusing.
Line numbers being on should absolutely be a default setting in SSMS. I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want line numbers on. Rich also looks at other ways you can customize the look and feel of SSMS, such as map mode for the vertical scroll bar, organizing pinned tabs, and more.
Comments closed