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Category: SQL Server Management Studio

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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SSMS Query Hint Recommendation Tool

Published 2025-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Brent 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.

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First Impressions of SSMS 22 Preview 1

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse 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.

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Connecting to SQL Server when TempDB Transaction Log is Full

Published 2025-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Garry 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.

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