Hello and welcome to Dear SQL DBA, a
  podcast and YouTube show for SQL
  Server developers and database
  administrators. I'm Kendra Little from
  SQLWorkbooks.com. Today I'm going to
  talk about what people love and what
  people hate about SQL Server
  Management Studio . I'm not going to get
  super technical today, I'm just going to dish a
  little bit about Management Studio and
  why people feel really strongly about it.
  The question that inspired this episode
  is this: I was giving a webcast on tips and
  tricks for using Management Studio, and
  one of the very first questions that
  came in before the webcast even started
  was, "why does Management Studio crash so
  much?" I've had management studio
  crash on me plenty of times in the past,
  too. People love that SQL Server
  Management Studio is so configurable and
  the tips and tricks web cast that I gave--
  it contains a lot of all of the ways you
  can set up Management Studio to get
  things like you want them to be. Also, how
  to do some things that it might not be
  obvious that you can even do them in a
  faster way. But one of the reasons that
  people also really can dislike
  Management Studio is that they find it
  really confusing. This is related
  to why people have really strong feelings
  about Management Studio: because there's
  a pretty strong learning curve. There's
  a ton of things that you can do in
  SQL Server Management Studio and it's
  very very highly configurable, but to a
  level that that actually makes it pretty
  confusing! Sometimes I get into a
  situation myself where -- I've been
  using this thing for many many years
  since it came out with SQL Server
  2005, back in the day. I remember when
  Management Studio first came out, I was
  like, " I don't know if I like this thing!"
  Because I was very comfortable
  with the old tools. And now,
  sometimes there will be a setting that
  I'm looking for, and just finding it can
  be pretty tricky. There's even a little
  "find" bar in the settings where you can
  search for a given setting -- under tools /
  options, when you're going into the
  different things you can configure 00 and
  sometimes that "find" bar doesn't even
  find me what I'm looking for. To make
  the best of this, what I do and what a
  lot of people do is: I have a setup
  checklist for SQL Server Management
  Studio that I like to use. When
  I'm configuring Management Studio I have
  a list I can run off: these
  are the things that give me what I want to
  set Management Studio up to my
  preferences, because preferences do
  differ. Having this setup list also can
  help you just remember what you like
  about Management Studio that it doesn't
  do by default. I have worked in different
  situations, and I've had situations where
  as a consultant I'm not just connecting
  to things always from my version of
  Management Studio. I'm looking remotely
  at someone else's computer, and I'm using
  their Management Studio set up. And
  it's not always cool to just change
  someone's setup. Having the setup
  checklist helps - even if I'm not
  going to run through it, knowing what's
  on my list of things that I change
  sets me up to expect, "ok
  I know the items that aren't
  going to be normal to me because they are
  the things that I typically change." I
  can tell for instance: I'm using
  someone else's install of Management Studio,
  if I script out indexes and the
  indexes are compressed, it's not going to
  script out the data
  compression settings, because that that's
  not configured by default. I know what
  to look for if I'm going to do
  certain things. It's not going to do that
  unless that person has configured it as
  well. One of the other things that people
  love about Management Studio-- I love this
  too-- is that there's a lot of shortcuts,
  and you can configure a lot of your
  own shortcuts. You don't
  have to reach the mouse super 
  often. You can keep your hands on
  the keyboard in Management Studio. 
  That's great, and when you're in
  the flow and you're using a lot of the
  keyboard shortcuts, it just feels
  really cool. It feels really good:
  there's something about that flow of
  being able to do a lot of things on the
  keyboard that is fun. But there's
  also the fact that it's hard to remember
  all of these shortcuts. Even shortcuts
  that you know pretty well, if
  you don't use them for a while and then
  you go back, you're like, "oh wait, how
  did I do that thing again?" The
  muscle memory is gone. To learn shortcuts,
  what I like to do is to practice them
  in small groups.
  I found that I don't do super well
  learning lots of shortcuts at once.
  Instead, I like to have a list of them --
  and I put this together with my setup
  checklist in my free course
  on Management Studio Shorcuts and Secrets -- and
  I not only have the list of things
  I like to configure, but I keep a list of
  shortcuts there too. I like to
  periodically review them and practice
  using them. Because even even shortcuts I
  kind of know, if I'm not in the habit of
  using them, I don't
  remember them. So I'll 
  periodically look through the list and
  be like, "oh yeah, I should get back to
  using this shortcut on the keyboard to
  get me down to the results pane, so that
  I don't just grab the mouse every time I
  want to go down to the results pane," for
  for example. (That's F6, by the way.) My favorite
  shortcuts these days are using the
  little IDE that you can use to switch
  between sessions. If you do ctrl + tab it
  brings up this little display and
  hitting ctrl + tab iterates you through
  all of your Management Studio sessions.
  You can easily switch between what
  you've got open. If you do alt + f7 that
  brings up the same IDE, but lets you
  switch over to tools like Object Explorer,
  and things like that. You can
  actually arrow around when you bring it
  up with alt + f7, say if you
  are on Object Explorer and then you want
  to switch back to a session. Alt + f7 is
  really
  flexible - I don't love it because on some
  keyboards I have to hit a function key -
  I have to hit "fn" to be
  able to use a function keys, so control
  tab works on more of my keyboards and is
  easier. I just I can't get enough of
  that switching between sessions. it's a
  lot like the Windows alt + tab, but within
  Management Studio for your sessions.
  People also love the flexibility of
  Management Studio.  It does so many things.
  When you think about all of the
  different things-- there's a wizard
  you can open that scripts out all the
  objects in the database. There's security
  you can configure. There's objects you
  can create. I mean, there's just so many
  little tools in Management Studio, and it's
  even getting bigger. Right now we have an
  Extended Events GUI within Management
  Studio, whereas ye old SQL Profiler --
  there used to be a shortcut to it, and I guess
  there still is, you can open
  it from Management Studio, but it's 
  another application. Management
  Studio is getting more and more
  integrated as this giant Swiss Army
  knife, but there's always things that
  people dislike that it's missing. One
  thing I found is that certain
  things that I thought Management Studio
  didn't do are in there! I just didn't
  know how to get to them. A lot of
  these-- for example, the
  scripting options I was talking about. I
  thought for a long time that <anagement
  Studio just wouldn't script out things if
  you're scripting a partitioned index. That
  it just wouldn't script out the filegroup
  that it's on-- or wait, that's not it,
  it's the partition scheme
  that it's created on! That's
  actually like the compression settings:
  that's one of the options you can configure. There's
  whole series of settings for how things
  get scripted out under Tools / Options.
  There's a whole scripting section for
  Object Explorer. I just didn't know it
  existed. I didn't find out that it
  existed until tweeted about
  this: "is this a bug that it doesn't
  script out X?" And Adam
  Machanic answered: "it does that, and
  here's where it is." Lo and behold, the
  things that I thought were missing were
  actually there. If you do have things
  where you're like, "I really think it
  should do this differently," you can file
  a suggestion or a bug at connect.microsoft.com.
  One of the ones that I've
  seen recently is when you drag over the
  all the column names -- you're dragging
  over the columns *folder*, rather:
  in Object Explorer you can grab the
  column folder for a table and drag that
  column folder over, and it will
  auto-populate the names of all of the
  columns in a comma delimited list in
  your session. But it doesn't put the
  square brackets around the column names.
  If you drag over the table name it will
  put safety brackets around the table
  name, so if you have any weird characters
  in there everything still works. So
  there's an inconsistency between
  what you drag over from Object Explorer
  to your window, and someone filed -- I can't
  remember if it was a bug or a suggestion --
  but basically, "plz make it consistent." The
  developer looked at this and was like, "oh
  yeah, we can totally fix that." I
  believe that the fix hasn't been
  released yet, but the code for the the
  bug is in the "completed" state. I
  don't think that release for Management
  Studio is out now, but I can't remember. (I'm like, "did
  that happen the last time I tested it?")
  But filing a connect item got things changed and
  got things fixed. That's one
  of the cool things: if you want it to
  be different, first of all ask on
  Twitter and see, "is it actually there and
  I just don't know about it?" But also, Microsoft
  is open to knowing what do you want this
  thing to do, and how can we do things
  better. Your change could become
  reality! I really love how active the
  Management Studio coding team has
  become. For Management Studio, it used to
  be that we only got updates when
  SQL Server got updated. Now
  Management Studio releases on its
  own, and this is fantastic
  because they can release
  as often as they're ready to release. 
  When we update Management Studio, we
  can choose: do we want to update it on
  the production server at all? Or do we
  just want to update it on our client
  machines now, and maybe update 
  Management Studio more
  quickly on our client machines than we
  would on the production Server itself,
  where we may not want to reboot every
  time we just have an update to
  Management Studio. There are still folks
  who are afraid to upgrade for a variety
  of reasons. If I'm running a new version
  of Management Studio, is everything going to
  work? This is valid! With
  any software, when things change,
  sometimes things break. There was a
  recent version of Management Studio
  where if you were connecting to a
  case-sensitive instance, 
  there were certain graphical elements
  that didn't work as they had before. But
  the good news is you can choose how you
  update Management Studio, in the sense
  of how many versions of Management Studio
  you have. This is particularly useful
  with major versions of Management Studio.
  we recently had just a big major version come out,
  and Management Studio you do side by side
  installations. So you can do things
  like say: ok I'm going to try out the new
  version on my client computer, but if
  anything's weird I can you know run a
  version on a different machine that's
  older. But you can ALSO install side by
  side on your computer the latest and
  greatest and keep the old one there if you want
  to go back even the last major version.
  "I'm going to just keep this last major
  version of it around for a while.
  It doesn't have the new look and feel,
  and it doesn't have some of the cool
  things in the new version, but for
  accomplishing basic tasks it's my old
  faithful." You can keep that old version
  around for a really long time, and that
  lets you say, "okay, I'm only going to use the
  new updated SSMS against our dev
  instances. I still have my older version
  to use against production." You can be as
  careful as you want to be, which i think
  is terrific.
  And
  always, always, test against
  development, and update on your
  workstation before you ever go and touch
  things on the production server. One of
  the things that I can't get enough of is
  that lots of people in the community
  document things for SSMS. They create their
  checklists for "here's the things I
  change in SSMS," and they also mention and
  create presentations for their favorite
  shortcuts and their tips and tricks.
  I can't get enough of those sessions. I
  seriously would watch one a week or
  maybe even more often if there were a
  ton of them out there. On the other hand,
  there is a lot of community
  participation because it's so
  complicated. There may be times where
  something you see in a presentation, and you
  try to do it, and it doesn't work for you.
  Maybe that's because you're
  connected through a VM and something's
  overriding a key in the shortcut you're
  trying to use. Or maybe it's for another
  reason. Let's get back to the original
  question that inspired
  me to put this together. It
  was, "why does my Management Studio
  crash so much?" This is
  similar to, "why doesn't X feature work
  for me in Management Studio?" One of the
  first things to just check is what
  version of Management Studio are you
  running? How old is it? You
  may be hitting a bug in an older version
  of Management Studio. It might be a bug
  that causes it to crash, or it might be a
  bug where just some things didn't work.
  For example, one of my favorite shortcuts
  is ctrl + U.
  It takes you up to the "use database" box.
  I've had some folks be like, "it just
  doesn't work for me." Well, there was a bug
  in an older version of Management Studio
  that was "ctrl + u doesn't work."
  For some of these folks, updating
  Management Studio fixed it. Some of the
  crashing bugs are from older versions as
  well. Also, are you using a plugin, or are
  you connecting via a
  virtual machine that could be causing
  the problem? Some of the cases I've had
  where ctrl+U
  wasn't working for people was
  actually caused by the fact that they
  were using a plugin that had broken
  ctrl + u as well!
  You've got to test out, "what
  do I have installed that isn't from
  Microsoft, that's extra in here, and
  could it be causing the problem as well?"
  Sometimes it might be also that of
  course your virtual machine provider
  thinks that keyboard shortcut really
  means something else, too. If you are
  seeing repeated crashing, and it isn't
  any of these things, have you reported it
  to Microsoft? Because you should report
  it to Microsoft! If Management Studio is
  crashing out all the time, they don't
  want that to happen. Use sites like
  connect.microsoft.comm if you're
  getting a specific error message. If
  the crash is happening when you do a
  given sequence of tasks, you can let the
  developers know about that as well. So do
  something about it, if you're
  tracking it down and you've just hit an
  issue in Studio. And
  please please please PLEASE share the
  things that you love doing in
  Management Studio. The tips and
  tricks that you know that make using it
  easier and more fun. Like I said
  I really can't get enough of that stuff.
  I would love to have even more shortcut
  cheat sheets be out there, and even more
  checklists of how to get more out
  of your day with Management Studio.
  Because, like you, I spend an awful lot of
  time in Management Studio, and the more
  fun I have, the more fun my day is! Thanks
  for joining me for Dear SQL DBA this
  week. I'm Kendra Little, and I'll see you
  again soon.
     
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