Category: SQL Server Management Studio

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.

James Anderson walks us through SQL Server Management Studio, including some configuration:

Sometimes when using SSMS you will see a redline under a table or object name in your T-SQL. This means SSMS thinks the object doesn’t exist in the current database. Usually it’s right, but if you have just created the object, the query editor wont know as it’s local cache is not regularly refreshed. To force a refresh you can hit Ctrl + Shift + R but I always forget keyboard shortcuts. For this I like to add a button to the toolbar.

This is a good intro-level article on SSMS basics and some configuration options.

Allen McGuire talks about SSMSBoost:

Tip 4: Results Grid aggregates – Some people do a lot of calculations with their data, whether it’s sales data or whatever.  You end up saving the query results to Excel and about five minutes later you have the totals, etc.  With SSMSBoost, you can have your totals in seconds.  Below I’m selecting 10 records from a sales related table.  Say I want to get the SUM, MIN, MAX and Count of the SALEPRICE.  All I do is slide my mouse down the column highlighting the cells and a pop-up will appear with that information:

This is probably my second-favorite feature of SSMSBoost; my favorite is automated crash recovery, and my third-favorite its snippet support.  SSMSBoost has a free version and I use it myself.  I try not to push many tools here on Curated SQL, but this is one worth checking out.