Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Wayne Sheffield clues us in on a nice Management Studio feature:

SSMS is a wonderful tool. You can drag Windows around, grouped with others, split, docked, undocked, hidden… it seems endless what you can do with them. You can even change what columns you see. Invariably, with all of this customization, things go wonky. I’ve even seen windows opened up on invisible monitors. Sometimes you can’t find the windows that you need. Conversely, windows that you don’t need are open all over the place. Sometimes, you just need to reset everything and start over. Short of reinstalling SSMS, how do you do this? You just reset the window layout.

It’s one of those options which stares you in the face but you can easily miss.

John Morehouse shows that the file growth rate GUI for Management Studio doesn’t report values under 1MB correctly:

While I was recently,  doing a review of a client’s environment I discovered that the GUI can lie to you when it comes to the database file growth rates.  By default, the data file is set to a 1MB growth rate and the log file is configured for a 10% growth rate.  Both are horrible settings for most OLTP environments.  However, starting with SQL Server 2016, the default growth rates are configured for 64MB, which in my opinion is better than the previous defaults.

Using the GUI to look at a 2017 Scratch database I have, we can see that the data file is configured for 1MB and the log file is set for 64MB growth.

I don’t think there’s a good reason for a file growth rate under 1 MB at this point.  That could have made sense in the late ’90s, but the idea of growing 128KB at a time is funny.

Daniel Hutmacher has a trick to right-align results in SQL Server Management Studio:

Here’s something I’ve found: the space character is roughly about half the width of a typical number character. So replace every leading space with two spaces, and it will look really neat in the grid:

Click through for the script.  This one goes near the back of the toolbelt, but it can come in handy when trying to troubleshoot values by eyeball and without Excel.

Claudio Silva shows how to make UTF-8 the default file encoding for SQL Server:

The file that is used to create a new query window has ANSI encoding but when I save the file on the PowerShell script I save it as UTF-8 because the client have comments on the code with unicode characters.

On this process, the unicode characters are replaced by some symbols.

Read on for the solution.

Greg Low shows how to run SQL Server Management Studio as a different Windows user:

Now if all you want to do is to use a SQL Server login, then that’s easy. When you connect to a server in Object Explorer, or when you start a new Database Engine query, you can just choose SQL authentication instead.

But three other scenarios commonly occur.

If you need to run SSMS as an administrator on a machine with UAC, you can do this:

You right-click the link to SSMS and choose Run as administrator.

I will most commonly use option number three, when somebody gives me AD credentials for a separate server but my laptop is not a member of that domain.

Alan Yu announces SQL Server Management Studio 17.7:

In addition to enhancements and bug fixes, SSMS 17.7 comes with several exciting new features:

• Support package scheduling in Azure-SSIS integration runtime.

• Support for SSIS package scheduling in SQL Agent on SQL Managed instance. It is now possible to create SQL Agent jobs to execute SSIS packages on the managed instance.

• Replication monitor now supports registering a listener for scenarios where publisher database and/or distributor database is part of Availability Group. So with this release of SSMS, you can monitor replication environments where publisher database and/or distribution database is part of Always On.

There are also several bugfixes that they call out.