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Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Snippets in SQL Server Management Studio

Published 2025-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Pablo Lozano creates a snippet:

The work of a DBA sometimes involves very repetive tasks:

  • Create a new login / users, or add/remove permissions
  • Run manual index / stats operations when the scheduled maintenance tasks are not enough and need a manual “push”
  • Taking a backup or restore one to troubleshoot issues or restore missing data…

There are many ways to accomplish this:

You can keep a folder full of scripts and just open the one you need and run it

Use a third-party tool to store all those scripts and paste them with a quick shortcut or a few clicks

Or the one I’ll be discussing, using snippets

Read on to see how you can create these. Snippets were great as a DBA, but I think I liked them even more when I was doing database development work, especially for repetitive code blocks like try-catch (or try-catch around a transaction) or searching in sys.sql_modules for a specific bit of code.

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Using GitHub in SSMS 21

Published 2024-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar ties into a Git repo:

SQL Server Management Studio v21 added native Git support, making it easier to use source control natively inside SSMS.

This feature is for developers who are already used to working with Github to manage specific object changes as they work, and who are already accustomed to Git terminologies like branches, commits, pushes, and pulls. This feature is not for DBAs who think it’s going to automatically keep your SQL Server’s object definitions inside source control for you. I totally understand why you’d want that, for sure, and I do as well, but our princess is in another castle.

Read on to see how it works. As I went through the article, my thought was that this is almost exactly the same experience as what you get with Visual Studio. And on the whole, I’d consider that a good thing, as this isn’t some implementation of 10% of the total functionality.

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First Impressions of SSMS 21

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan has some thoughts:

Some exciting news recently as SQL Server Management Studio 21 is available in preview. Head over here to download it and experiment with the latest. I’ve worked with it a little bit so far and hope to play around more over the Thanksgiving break.

Here are my early thoughts on what I’ve seen so far.

I’ve linked to a few articles on what’s new in SSMS 21 but Chad points out a couple of things I haven’t seen from people yet.

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First Thoughts on SSMS 21

Published 2024-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares some thoughts:

It’s been a long time coming, but all of a sudden there were a number of posts from Microsoft announcing the first preview of SQL Server Management Studio 21. This is big as it’s quite the overhaul from the SQL Server Management Studio we’re used to.

To give you some idea, here are my first impressions.

Vlad Drumea also takes a peek:

SQL Server Management Studio 21 Preview 1 was released 2 days ago, so I took it out for a spin and here are my first impressions so far.

Read on to see what’s in the preview today, some of the new functionality, and whether SSMS 21 is faster than SSMS 20.

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SSMS Layout and Tips

Published 2024-08-05 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika talks about SQL Server Management Studio:

I’d like to pin my Object Explorer and Registered Servers to the right and set them to auto-hide for these reasons:

  • I spend most of my time in the Query window and I like that it’s left-aligned
  • I have to resize the Object Explorer based on the level of nesting or length of the object name, sql jobs, etc
  • The Solution Explorer in Visual Studio is also on the right side

Read on for quite a few tips. Tom has a good tip regarding tabs and I’d bring up a separate tool for consideration: Tabs Studio. I paid for a license of it out of my own pocket when I was a database engineer and absolutely loved the control it gave me over displaying SSMS tabs, including having literally dozens of them on the screen at once.

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SSMS 20.2 and a Preview of 21

Published 2024-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato reaches out:

Hey SQL Tools fans!  We’re halfway through 2024 and due to a confluence of events we have a release of SQL Server Management Studio to announce, version SSMS 20.2.

While we’ve been focused on work for SSMS 21, we made time for a few updates to address known issues that affected your workflows and use of SSMS.  You can read about each update and fix in the release notes, but let’s cover some important fixes here.

Read on to see what’s new in 20.2, as well as some of the major plans in mind for SSMS 21.

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Central Management Servers and SSMS 20

Published 2024-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low works around an issue:

I’ve recently been doing work with a site that makes extensive use of Central Management Servers. And that’s an issue if you upgrade past v19.3 of SSMS.

Here’s my counter-argument: how frequent is it to find organizations that have enough SQL Server instances to make a Central Management Server worthwhile and also do not have any sort of certificate management process?

And more importantly, why don’t they have certificate management processes in place for SQL Server? This isn’t 2008 anymore—everybody (for some slight exaggeration of the term “everybody”) has certificate management in place for websites. It’s incredibly rare to find websites without TLS certificates, so somebody in your organization is managing certificates somehow. Why are these people not also managing certificates for SQL Server? Because once you have proper certificates in place rather than self-signed certs, there is no SSMS problem.

And if money is the issue, money is not the issue. Note that Daniel’s post is over 6 years old (and here’s me self-linking for street cred), meaning any company without the budget for proper certificates could have put this into place anytime over the past 6 years.

Self-signed certificates are okay for debugging purposes on personal machines. But they should not be acceptable for connecting to SQL Server in any environment. Certificate-driven encryption is a critical part of securing data movement over the wire, and a trusted certificate chain is critical for ensuring attackers cannot sit in the middle of that connection and read the data.

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SSMS 20 Minus Azure Data Studio

Published 2024-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling makes an observation:

I was quite publicly mystified by the coupling of Azure Data Studio into the SQL Server Management Studio installer. They’re different tools for different people.

This isn’t a tirade against Azure Data Studio, nor is it a victory lap since apparently the feedback item I posted was part of the decision to remove it.

This is purely informational, since the announcement that it’s not in there anymore is nearly as quiet as the announcement that it was being included back in SQL Server Management Studio 18.7, and only slightly louder than the availability of a command line switch to skip installing it.

I say this as someone whose primary SQL tool is Azure Data Studio: good. There’s a lot of functionality overlap between the two but it’s better making both of them optional.

Also, I’m subscribed to that same RSS feed Erik mentioned and fully agree with Erik’s assessment of Erin. Even if she is a Michigan fan.

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