Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Dinakar Nethi announces the release of a public preview of SQL Server Management Studio 18.0:

Shell improvements

• SSMS is based on the new VS 2017 Isolated Shell. This means a modern shell that unlocks all the accessibility features from both SSMS and VS 2017.

• Smaller download size (~400 MB). This is less than half of what SSMS 17.x is.

• SSMS can be installed in a custom folder. Currently, this is only available on the command line setup. Pass the extra argument to SSMS-Setup-ENU.exe, SSMSInstallRoot = C:\MyFolder

• High DPI enabled by default.

• Better support for multiple monitors to ensure dialogs and windows pop up on the expected monitor.

• Isolation from SQL Engine. SSMS does not share components with SQL engine anymore. More isolation from SQL engine allows for more frequent updates.

• Package Ids no longer needed to develop SSMS Extensions.

18.0 will install alongside 17, so you can have both at the same time.

Josh Simar shows us that you don’t need a GUI to customize SQL Server Management Studio:

There has been many a blog post out there that shows you some of the great ways you can customize the look and feel of your management studio windows. One of my favorite recently published ones is from the great people at Brent Ozar Unlimited (Brent himself in this case) here.

There is even many a blog post out there about how you can export your settings from one and import it to another here.

All of the blog posts I’ve read however have one problem for me. They seem very “clicky”, as in a lot of clicking of the mouse (or keyboard shortcuts) has to happen every time you want to import your settings and I thought there has to be a more programatic way.

After all, many of us espouse to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) technique when coding. Why wouldn’t we want to trim time and energy off of something as basic as a settings import.

And Josh has that solution.

Kenneth Fisher shows us how to retain CR/LF values when copying and pasting from SQL Server Management Studio grids:

Now, you do need to be aware that the settings Tools -> Options are just for new query windows. If you want to change the settings for an already existing window then either go to Query -> Query Options or right click in the window and go to Query Options from there.

Either way, once you are done and re-run your script you get this when you copy and paste:

Click through for the tip.

Grant Fritchey shows us something that the SSMS tools team snuck in on us:

One of the many new sets of functionality introduced in SQL Server Management Studio 17 is the new option “Analyze Actual Execution Plan.” If Microsoft continues down this path, there will be a lot of useful functionality at some point. If you haven’t yet looked at Analyze Actual Execution Plan, well, read on.

I hope they do expand this out.  I can see it being very beneficial, but it needs to look at a lot more than just cardinality estimations.

Brent Ozar shares his configuration settings for SQL Server Management Studio:

Under Query Results, SQL Server, Results to Grid, I change my XML data size to unlimited so that it brings back giant query plans. (Man, does my job suck sometimes.)

A lot of presenters like to check the box for “Display results in a separate tab” and “Switch to results tab after the query executes” because this gives them more screen real estate for the query and results. I’m just really comfortable with Control-R to hide the results pane.

And I just went and removed a bunch of menu bar icons I never use…  Good advice from Brent.

Andy Mallon hates brackets and likes regular expressions:

There are cases where you need brackets, such as having objects with “illegal” characters in them. These rules apply to database names, column names, and all object names. (I’m going to simply refer to “object names” for simplicity, though I concede that “identifier” might be a more correct term.) If you want to put a space or hyphen in an object name, then you’re going to have to use [brackets] to “quote” the name every time you reference it. Similarly, you can’t start an object name with a number, even though it’s a valid character in any other position of the object name: 8Ball is an illegal object name, but AM2 is perfectly OK. There are a bunch of other scenarios, but I won’t go into them all.

If SMO tried to only use [brackets] where necessary, that would likely be a complicated and error-prone branch of code. It’s safer to always include [brackets], and there’s no time when [brackets] will break your code.

Read on to see how Andy gets rid of those pesky things.