SSMS Tips and Tricks 5-6: Playing a sound when a query completes

In a previous post , I mentioned that when a long running query completes, I might not have been waiting around for it, and so I wanted to know when it completed.

But sometimes I do wait around for a query to complete, yet I’m distracted by other things and don’t realize that the query has actually completed. That’s not surprising because if a query takes a long time, I’m probably going to go on with other work while that’s running.

So I want to get a prompt when the query finishes.

SSMS does provide an option for this. In Tools, Options, Query Results, there is an option to Play the Windows default beep when a query batch completes.

I do wish it was a stronger option than this but at least it’s a start.

What I’d particularly like would be:

• Ability to play a different sound, not just the default beep.
• Ability to enable/disable this on a specific query window once a query is already running.

Having this on all the time would be quite annoying, so I’d be pretty selective about using it in its current form.

2025-08-29