Category: SQL Server Management Studio

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.

Andrea Allred shows a nice trick using the Object Explorer Details window in SSMS:

One of the tips that I was super surprised that many people didn’t know is the Object Explorer Details. It allows you to delete multiple objects at once, script out multiple objects at once and just do some really cool stuff. How do I access this magic you are asking? When in management studio, click on View>>Object Explorer Details.

For those one-off jobs where you need to script out a dozen objects, this is very helpful.

Steve Jones shows extended properties:

Once I click Properties, I get a dialog with a lot of items on the left. The bottom one is for Extended Properties, with a simple add/edit/delete grid. Here I can see the property(ies) I’ve added.

However this is cumbersome for me. I’d much rather find a way to query the information, which is what I need to do with an application of some sort. I’d think sp_help would work, but it doesn’t.

Extended properties, like Service Broker, was a great idea that floundered because there was never a good UI.  Given how much fighting Steve has to do to see one object’s properties, it’s no wonder they’re so relatively unused.  And that’s a shame, because with the right tooling, they can be a great way of documenting data structures.

Kenneth Fisher describes his SSMS setup:

Every time I install a new version of SSMS I make a handful of changes to the default setup. For my own notes, and in case anyone is interested in some of the things you can do with SSMS I thought I’d post a list of those changes.

I also use a darker theme, very similar to Fisher’s; mine is designed to look like vim blue.  Of course, personal SSMS settings are personal.