Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Andrew Kelly has a few tricks up his sleeve when it comes to Management Studio shortcuts:

I was giving an internal talk on SSMS productivity trips and there were a few that I believe are seldom used but can be a real time or keystroke saver that I would like to mention. To the best of my knowledge these will work in any version of SSMS from at least 14.0 onward and likely earlier but I can’t verify older versions at this time. Since these are basically Visual Studio shortcuts they also work in Visual Studio and SSDT to the best of my knowledge. The first is the ability to select text in a vertical fashion as shown in the examples below. Before we get to how to do that I know your first question is why would you want to do that. Well I will leave all the possibilities up to you since everyone has slightly different techniques and circumstances. However I am confident that after seeing a few examples it will spark interest in many of you and you will immediately think of times when this will help you code more efficiently.

Read on for five tips.

Derik Hammer shows off some of the grid functionality in Red Gate’s SQL Prompt:

Even more common than scripting out INSERT statements, I may need to copy a set of values and format them for an IN clause. Normally I would use a text editor such as Notepad++ to reformat the multiple lines of values. SSMS can also be used but I find Notepad++’s find/replace features better.

Now I do not have to worry about copying/pasting the values and making changes. SQL Prompt delivers a direct conversion from values to IN clause.

Click through for some animated GIFs showing how to use this functionality.

Andy Leonard has a short SSMS tips post about how you can take advantage of regions in your code:

There are a few tools and add-ins that support the creation of “regions” in T-SQL code. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) supports one way to separate sections of long-ish T-SQL scripts natively, by using begin/end:

It’s an interesting SSMS trick.

Arvind Shyamsundar explains a recent Management Studio change:

One such change SSMS got for free is the connection resiliency logic within the SqlConnection.Open() method. To improve the default experience for clients which connect to Azure SQL Database, the above method will (in the case of initial connection errors / timeouts) now retry 1 time after sleeping for 10 seconds. These numbers are configurable by properties called ConnectRetryCount (default value 1) and ConnectRetryInterval (default value 10 seconds.) The previous versions of the SqlConnection class would not automatically retry in cases of connection failure.

In general, because of these changes, transient errors (across slow networks or when working with Azure SQL Database) are less frequent. However, when you consider that a lot of SSMS users still use it with ‘regular’ SQL Server – either in a VM in the cloud or on-premises, there is a subtle but distinct impact of these changes which may affect administrators of ‘regular’ SQL Server databases.

Read on for details on why Management Studio hangs for 10-second periods, and see how to disable connection retry yourself.

Jana Sattainathan shows some of the value of SQL Server Management Studio templates, along with an important warning:

If you do start creating your own templates, you are responsible for backing them up. To locate the folder where they are stored

1. Open DOS command prompt
2. Run “echo %APPDATA%”
3. Note the base path
4. Navigate to %AppData%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\{SQL Server Version}\Tools\Shell\Templates\Sql\

(where %AppData% is the base path from

and {SQL Server Version} = 90 for SQL 2005, 100 for SQL 2008, 110 for SQL 2012, 120 for SQL 2014 and 130 for SQL 2016)

Templates are extremely useful for day-to-day development as well as giving a handy way of generating snippets of code, like estimating row count without having to remember to join to sys.indexes, sys.objects, and sys.dm_db_partition_stats.