Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Shane O’Neill shows how to see the queries which were run in Management Studio:

Suddenly you’re not sure if you really ran the SELECT statement at all.
Maybe you ran the insert statement and 2089 rows were marked to never be seen again!
Or maybe that other table only had 2089 rows in it and you’ve now deleted every one!!

Now this blog post is not going to deal with fail-safe’s for preventing those scenarios because 1) you should already know how to do that, and b) if you don’t know, then maybe back away until you research it… It’s only going to deal with a nice little way you can figure out what it was that you just ran.

I don’t think this will go into my everyday processes, but it’s handy to have when you absolutely need to make sure you’re running the correct line in a script.

Steve Jones shows  some basic SQLCMD operation:

I had the need to connect from the command line recently, and decided to make a quick post on using SQLCMD, as I had an issue.

SQLCMD is a command line utility that comes with SQL Server. I know many people don’t use command lines, but they are handy at times.

SQLCMD and OSQL aren’t things you typically need to use a lot, but sometimes you won’t have the ability to run Management Studio and it’s good to know that there are built-in alternatives.

Kendra Little shows Management Studio execution plan improvements in 2016:

The best features are the ones that you use all the time. SQL Server 2016 Management Studio’s bringing improvements in navigating around execution plans.

Click + Mouse Scroll: Zooming!

You can now make your plans bigger and smaller with this combo. It will zoom into the region where you have the mouse.

Click + Drag lets you move the plan

This is really handy for moving right to left.

Good for those times when SQL Sentry Plan Explorer isn’t available.

Jens Vestergaard shows us how to filter tables in Management Studio:

As a quick tip, this on is one of these tool tips, that just makes your everyday much easier. Sometimes, more than often, you run into databases that contains a huge number of tables – all listed alphabetically. This can, at times, be cumbersome and annoying to browse. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) actually has a feature that will assist you in getting your job done, quicker; It’s called Filtering.

My most common filter criterion is by schema, but there are several filtering options available.

Aaron Bertrand notes that there’s a new SSMS preview available:

Gianluca Sartori (@spaghettidba) blogged about the issues you may have noticed with older versions of Management Studio on HiDPI, UQHD, or 4K/5K screens in his post, “SSMS in High-DPI Displays: How to Stop the Madness.” Essentially, Windows tries to scale things for your DPI settings and, depending on the technology used to render your fonts and dialogs, this can end up with ugly and sometimes unusable screens. Gianluca’s fix is to make a registry change and add a manifest file to the SSMS directory so that SSMS no longer tries to render Windows’ scaling changes. In the latest builds of SQL Server 2016, SSMS now acts as if the manifest file were in place. Take a look at the following image:

That’s music to my ears; I use a high-resolution laptop and before Gianluca’s solution, it was impossible to use SSMS.  I’m looking forward to SSMS 2016, but probably won’t move until the add-ons I use are supported; I’ve grown to like them too much to make the jump, even on a trial basis.

Aaron Bertrand walks through display differences between SQL Sentry Plan Explorer and SSMS:

Now, in the process of developing Plan Explorer, we have discovered several cases where ShowPlan doesn’t quite get its math correct. The most obvious example is percentages adding up to over 100%; we get this right in cases where SSMS is ridiculously off (I see this less often today than I used to, but it still happens).

Interpreting execution plans is not a trivial exercise, and this is an interesting look at how SQL Sentry developers (and supporters within the broader community) have worked on it through the years.

Denny Cherry shows us that you can make Management Studio beep when a batch completes:

The next time you run a query (you might need to close all your query windows or restart SSMS, you usually do with this sort of change in SSMS) it’ll beep when the query is done.

Personally I’ve actually used this as an alarm clock when doing long running overnight deployments so that I’d get woken up when the script was done so I could start the next step. It’s also handy when you want to leave the room / your desk while queries are running.

I must have seen that screen dozens of times and never once noticed this checkbox.

Slava Murygin shows us some keyboard shortcuts in SQL Server Management Studio:

If you work with SQL Server for a long time you’ve probably learn some Keyboard combinations to speed up your administration or development process.
The full list of SSMS Shortcut keys you can find in MSDN

I will try to re-categorize the most interesting ones

If you spend a lot of time in Management Studio, learning keyboard shortcuts will make your life easier.