SSMS Tips and Tricks 1-6: Filters in Object Explorer

If you are working with databases with large numbers of objects, the contents of Object Explorer in SQL Server Management Studio can start to become a bit overwhelming. I wish it offered an option to group by schema. That would be helpful.

But you can at least filter by things like schema, when you need to work with a specific set of objects. You’ll notice that if you click on the database name, that the filter in the toolbar is grayed out, but if you click on a node below that like Tables, you can click on the toolbar filter icon. You can also right-click the node and choose to filter:

You then are presented with these options:

That will work to give me just the tables in the Warehouse schema but notice that the operator is Contains. There are other options:

So I could see all the tables except those that are in this schema. Note that Creation Date has even more options:

I can then also use this for other interesting queries such as “Just show me tables that have been created since 10th May:

2025-05-19