Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: SQL Server Management Studio

SQL Server Management Studio 18.1 Now Available

Published 2019-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Dinakar Nethi takes us through some changes in SQL Server Management Studio version 18.1:

We’re excited to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18.1. It’s been just over a month since we released SSMS 18.0. While we brought in many fantastic capabilities, we also regressed some functionality for some of our users. We are happy to share that we’ve fixed those and are also bringing in some new features along with bug fixes.

The big thing for a lot of people is that database diagrams have returned. I was never the biggest fan of those, but there was enough of an uproar to bring them back.

Comments closed

Generating Scripts from SSMS

Published 2019-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar shows how you can use Management Studio to generate scripts for database objects:

Sales.SalesOrderDetail looks like a good choice. Let’s generate a script for that table, all associated objects, and its data.

The safest way to create structure including all indexes, keys, defaults, constraints, dependencies, triggers, etc. is to use SSMS Generate Scripts.

I would also recommend becoming familiar with the Powershell command to generate scripts and what dbatools has on store.

Comments closed

Choosing Between Management Studio and Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar gives us the lay of the tooling land:

Every time there’s a new release of SQL Server or SQL Server Management Studio, you can grab the latest version of SSMS and keep right on keepin’ on. Your job still functions the same way using the same tool, and the tool keeps getting better.

And it’s free. You don’t have to ask the boss for upgrade money. You can just download it, install it, and take advantage of things like the cool new execution plan est-vs-actual numbers (which also cause presenters all over to curse, knowing that they have to redo a bunch of screenshots.)

I spend a lot of time jumping back & forth between SQL Server and Postgres, and lemme just tell you, the tooling options on the other side of the fence are a hot mess.

Yeah, Management Studio is the best of the bunch. I’m using Azure Data Studio more at home but still need a couple of plugins to use it often at work. And those two beat pretty much every other tool I’ve ever worked with.

Comments closed

SSMS Grid Options

Published 2019-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Michelle Haarhues provides details on the different options for sending results to a grid in SQL Server Management Studio:

What is Results to Grid and what can it do for you?  Results to Grid are Query Results options in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that can help users customize their query results in a variety of ways that can help make users more efficient.  Some of these might be little changes, but when used often throughout the day, they can make a big difference.  Once you change the setting, you will need to open a new query window for the change to go into effect

The two I wish were on by default are column headers when copying or saving results, and retaining CR/LF on copy or save.

Comments closed

Connecting with Read Intent

Published 2019-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack shows two ways to connect to an Availablity Group listener with read-only intent:

SQLCMD
The -Kreadonly switch is your key to success here but remember to also specify the database using -d. When not set (and with an initial catalog of master for my login), I found I always got the primary instance back during my check. This simple omission cost me hours of troubleshooting work, because I was convinced my listener wasn’t working correctly. In fact, I just wasn’t testing it correctly.

There’s some good information in here for sqlcmd and for SQL Server Management Studio.

Comments closed

SSMS Autorecover

Published 2019-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Michelle Haarhues takes us through auto-recovery in Management Studio:

Periodically there is a crash, power surge, or sudden reboot of your computer.  Of course, you had SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) open and you were working on something important.  That seems to be the only time there is a crash/reboot.  You can lose work that that was open in SSMS but has not saved.  There is an AutoRecover feature in SSMS so all may not be lost.  

Read on to learn more about auto-recovery. It only restores on crashes, though there are third-party plugins you can get to restore after start. Azure Data Studio restores on restart as well, so kudos to the ADS team for that.

Comments closed

SSMS 18.0 RC1

Published 2019-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Dinakar Nethi announces the first release candidate of SQL Server Management Studio 18.0:

As we get closer to the General Availability of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18, we have decided to have a quick release of the Release Candidate (RC) build.

You can download SSMS 18.0 RC1 today and for more details on what’s included, please see the Release Notes.

It’s been in preview for a while but things are now getting real. I’ll have to check later on if it fixes the bug I found with PolyBase on SQL Server.

Comments closed

Fun with Emoji in SSMS

Published 2019-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky shares a method to generate any Unicode character in SQL Server Management Studio:

I used to go to the Emoticons (Emoji) 1F600—1F64F page of unicode-table.com to copy and paste characters, code points, or check the encoding chart at the bottom of each character page (the “hex” column of both “UTF-16BE” and “UTF-16LE” rows have proven most useful).
But not anymore. Now, I just hit:   Ctrl + 0.

When I do that, I get a list of 188,657 code points. Each row contains the official code point value (“U+HHHH”), the integer value, the hex value (“0xHHHH”), the character itself, the UTF-16 Little Endian byte sequence (how it is actually stored, and what you get if you convert an NVARCHAR value to VARBINARY), the surrogate pair values, the T-SQL notation (which does not require using an _SC or _140_ collation), the HTML notation (“&#xHHHH;”), and finally the C-style notation (“\xHHHH” ; used for C / C++ / C# / Java / etc). I can copy and paste any of those values and use them in queries, emails, blog posts, .NET code, and so on.

Click through to see how Solomon does this.

Comments closed

Capturing Queries With XEvent Profiler

Published 2019-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato explains how to use the XEvent Profiler in SSMS 17.3 and later:

It’s worth pointing out that neither the Standard or TSQL session writes out to a file. In fact, there’s no target for either event session (if you didn’t know that you can create an event session without a target, now you know). If you want to save this data for further analysis, you need to do one of the following:

1. Stop the data feed and save the output to a file via the Extended Events menu (Export to | XEL File…)
2. Stop the data feed and save the output to a table in a database via the Extended Events menu (Export to | Table…)
3. Alter the event session and add the event_file as a target.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed