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Category: SQL Server Management Studio

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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Execution Plan Properties

Published 2019-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling reminds you to check out the properties of execution plan elements:

I read a lot of posts about query plans, and I rarely see people bring up the properties tab.

And I get it. The F4 button is right next to the F5 button. If you hit the wrong one, you might ruin everything.

But hear me out, dear reader. I care about you. I want your query plan reading experience to be better.

Erik provides sound advice here.

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Intellisense and the DAC

Published 2019-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin doesn’t like severity 20 errors just popping up for no good reason:

Yesterday I’ve needed to use Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) once in a while, and because I have all kinds of notifications in my system, I immediately got an “Severity 20” alert.

As you probably know, Severity 20 Errors “Indicate system problems and are fatal errors” (See books online: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/errors-events/database-engine-error-severities?view=sql-server-2017)

Even though “Severity 20” does not indicate any problems with data and belong only to a user process it is still worth to investigate the problem.

Read on to see the cause of Slava’s problem and how there’s no way to fix it in SSMS.

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