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Category: SQL Server Management Studio

Fixing Screen Repainting Issues in SSMS

Published 2020-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low has a workaround for an annoying problem:

Once again, I’m seeing lots of customers reporting screen repainting issues in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It mostly seems to affect version 18 but I’ve also seen it in version 17. And it’s most prevalent on Windows 10.

The typical issue is that you click on another open tab, and the contents of the tab doesn’t repaint. You are still seeing the previous tab. If you click into the tab, you start to see bits from both tabs.

Click through to see the fix. I’ve seen this issue pop up though I don’t remember seeing it on the latest version of SSMS 18…though now that I say that, I’m guaranteed to have the problem hit me today.

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Bug with UnmatchedIndexes and Filtered Indexes

Published 2020-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Taiob Ali points out a bug in SQL Server Management Studio:

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) showplan root node properties have two attributes to indicate when a filtered index can not be used during a parameterized query. One is ‘UnmatchedIndexes’, and the other one is under ‘Warnings’ attribute. Due to a bug in SSMS, the attributes are also showing positive results with filtered index and non-parameterized queries.

Let’s look at an example. I am using the AdventureWorks database, which you download from here.

If you want this fixed, vote up this Feedback item.

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Memory Optimizer Advisor

Published 2020-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Monica Rathbun takes us through the Memory Optimization Advisor in SQL Server Management Studio:

Previously I wrote about In-Memory Optimized Tables, in this blog I am going to discuss how to determine which tables could benefit from being In-Memory by using a tool called Memory Optimization Advisor (MOA). This a is a tool built into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that will inform you of which tables could benefit  using In Memory OLTP capabilities and which may have non supported features. Once identified, MOA will help you to actually migrate that table and data to be optimized. Let’s see how it works by walking through it using a table I use for demonstrations in AdventureWorks2016CTP3. Since this is a smaller table and doesn’t incur a ton writes it is not a good use case, however, for simplicity I am using it for this demo.

This is good for seeing which tables could easily move to memory-optimized and which you shouldn’t even try.

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Calculating the Pain of UDFs

Published 2019-12-26 by Kevin Feasel

Taiob Ali points out something added to SQL Server 2017 (and later 2016 and 2014):

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) version 17.5 added new showplan attributes UdfCpuTime and UdfElapsedTime to QueryTimeStats. These two attributes will measure the time and CPU spent on user-defined functions within a query execution hence helping to discover the impact of UDF execution within full query execution. This feature was first added in SQL Server 2017 CU3 and was backported to SQL Server 2016 SP2. Finding the execution time and CPU for UDF was always a challenge for Data professionals because the number of times a function will execute will vary.

This was a blind spot for a very long time.

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SSMS Regular Expressions

Published 2019-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Mitchell looks at regular expressions in SQL Server Management Studio:

Regular expressions (or simply regex for short) have long been used by system administrators and data professionals for searching and manipulating text. Regular expressions allow the user to find, replace, and manipulate text based on the pattern they define in the expression. While every text editor allows simple search-and-replace capabilities, regex allows for searching for partial matches, using wildcards, and even integrating special characters (such as newlines and tabs) into the search or replacement text.

Regular expressions have been a part of SSMS for as long as I can remember, and make the process of pattern-based SQL code search much easier. In this tip, I’ll show you a couple of brief examples of the use of regular expressions for working with SQL code in Management Studio.

Regular expressions have been in the product for a long time, but the set of available regular expressions changed when SSMS moved over to the Visual Studio shell. And in some ways (particularly around capture groups), that was a change for the worse.

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Editing Rows in SSMS–Behind the Scenes

Published 2019-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West explains what happens when you use the editor built into SQL Server Management Studio to modify rows directly:

A customer recently brought up an interesting thesis, that if you edit a table’s values using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using the edit feature, that the table is dropped and recreated in the background when you commit the changes.

This is false, but there had to be a good reason why they were under this misapprehension.

Read on to understand what does happen and where the customer might have gotten this idea.

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What’s New with Query Store in SSMS 18.4

Published 2019-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato takes us through changes to Query Store components in SQL Server Management Studio 18.4:

Last week the SQL Server Tools team released a new version of Management Studio, 18.4, and it dropped in the middle of my Query Store full day pre-con on Monday. Those two are related. There were some changes in SSMS 18.4 specific to Query Store, and for a few seconds over lunch I thought about downloading the new version and running it for my afternoon demos. But…I didn’t want to anger the demo Gods, so I stuck with 18.3.

Read on for info on the changes.

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SQL Server Management Studio 18.3

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dinakar Nethi announces a new version of SQL Server Management Studio:

Fixed the hard to see dialog for Query Options when the user right-clicks on the T-SQL editor window by making it resizable.

The Completion time message that’s visible in the result grid/file  that was introduced in SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 is now configurable under Tools > Options > Query Execution > SQL Server > Advanced > Show completion time.

In the connection dialog, we replaced Active Directory – Password and Active Directory – Integrated with Azure Active Directory – Password and Azure Active Directory – Integrated, respectively.

There are a pretty good number of bugfixes in this release.

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Hidden Modals and SSIS

Published 2019-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan knows how to make hidden modals rise to the surface in SSMS:

I am not sure if run into this but I do often enough on my SSMS 17.9.1 version – suddenly, the SSMS window will not register any mouse-clicks although it will seemingly look fine. The reason is because there is a Modal Window somewhere hidden. Sometimes, ALT-TAB followed by ESC will do the trick but not always.  In the beginning, when I did not know about the modal window, I used to kill SSMS and restart it but you don’t have to.

Click through to see how to do this and save yourself a task killing.

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