Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Wayne Sheffield has pledged to do a month worth of SSMS tips and he’s off to a good start.  Here’s day 1, where he talks about creating a solution in SSMS:

Are you the type of person that has all of your custom queries in one folder, and finding the particular one that you are looking for can sometimes be a pain? Well, solutions can certainly help you. A solution consists of one or more projects, which then contain files. In SSMS, the project can contain Connections, Queries and Miscellaneous files. These various projects can be used to group your queries so that they are easily accessible.

Personally, I maintain two different solutions. One is for all the presentations that I do, each in a separate project within that solution. The other is all of my day-to-day scripts.

The first step in using a solution is to open up the Solution Explorer window. This is available from the View Menu | Solution Explorer, or by pressing the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+L.

Day two shows you how to split the screen in SSMS so you can view two sections of the same script at the same time.

Day three shows you how to create tab groups, so you can see two scripts at the same time.

Shane O’Neill shares a few methods for preventing accidental script runs:

Recently I came across a question in Stack Overflow (SO) that said the following:

The other day I was trying to hit another button on the menu but hit Execute – which executed the whole code and ended up deleting some tables. I have always found this scary that hitting one button can execute the whole code.

I want SQL Server to execute code only when something is selected. Is it possible? Or can SQL Server prompt before executing a query?

I thought this is a great question because it can be answered in 4 different ways…

Click through for those four methods.

Jen McCown goes through a good example of where regular expressions can solve a DBA’s boring and repetitive task:

What I needed was to be able to check each one of those tables, and see if any of the should-be-deleted rows still exist. Of course, I can certainly type this all out by hand…

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM dbo.Table1 WHERE val = 1) SELECT 'Table1 has undeleted rows!' as TableName;
IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM dbo.Table2 WHERE val = 1) SELECT 'Table2 has undeleted rows!' as TableName;

*Sigh*. I’m already  bored. And in reality, I had 45 of these statements, not 15. I’m not a big fan of repetitive, monkey-button work.

SSMS regular expressions are great.  I got to see a version of Sean’s linked talk in person and it helped things click in my mind.

Bert Wagner shows off vertical selection in SSMS (using the Alt key):

Sometimes when writing an ad hoc query you might want to take the results of one query and put them into an IN() statement of another query.

Sure, you can write a subquery to put into your IN() statement…but that’s too much work for a one-time use disposable query.

What you can do instead is:

1. Copy your values of interest

2. Paste them into your IN() statement

3. Hold down the ALT key while dragging the mouse down in front of all of your pasted values

4. Type a comma (see video above for an easier demonstration).

For SSMS speedrunning strats, you can also hold down ALT + SHIFT and use your keyboard arrow keys instead of using the mouse.

Rohan Kumar announces a new management interface for SQL Server (among other things):

These new cross-platform capabilities have made SQL Server accessible to users of Windows, Linux and Mac. At PASS Summit, we are excited to provide a sneak peek at Microsoft SQL Operations Studio. In a few weeks, users will be able to download and evaluate this free, light-weight tool for modern database development and operations on Windows, Mac or Linux machines for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Increase your productivity with smart T-SQL code snippets and customizable dashboards to monitor and quickly detect performance bottlenecks in your SQL databases on-premises or in Azure. You’ll be able to leverage your favorite command line tools like Bash, PowerShell, sqlcmd, bcp and ssh in the Integrated Terminal window. Users can contribute directly to SQL Operations Studio via pull requests from the GitHub repository.

Steve Stedman comments on it:

This appears to be a new cross platform (Mac, Linux, and Windows) for running queries against SQL Server.

Perhaps this is a replacement for SQL Server Management Studio, or may just a subset of what SSMS does today, however it works cross platform, unlike SSMS.

You won’t be giving up Management Studio anytime soon, but there are some really cool parts of SQL Operations Studio forthcoming.

Wayne Sheffield looks at two new features in SQL Server Management Studio 17.3:

For this simple test, it worked pretty well, and it should work well for most of the requirements that you have. Time will tell how reliably this new feature does work.

The Import Flat File is available when connecting to SQL Server version 2005 or higher. I haven’t tried this on a lower version, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work there either. You can read more about this feature in Microsoft’s documentation.

You can definitely break the Import Flat File feature, but I appreciate it being smoother than the SSIS-based wizard of yore.  Wayne also shares his thoughts on the Extended Events Profiler.