SSMS Tips and Tricks 5-8: Turning off completion times

I’ve had many developers ask me how can I turn off those annoying completion time messages in SSMS?.

A while back, the product team decided that we’d all like completion times shown in the Messages output tab. I don’t share their enthusiasm for them.

For a start, a completion time was already shown here in the Properties window for the query, along with much more info:

So, for me, it really was quite irrelevant. Worse, I often use the output of the Messages tab as text for scripts, etc. The last thing I wanted were a bunch of completion times sprinkled through those.

Initially, you couldn’t turn it off either. Fortunately, the team listened to us all complaining about it, and they fixed it.

For One Query Window

If you want to disable these messages for a single query window, you can do it here from the Query menu, then Query Options, then Advanced.

As the Default

If you want this disabled by default, you can do that from the Tools menu, then Options, then Query Execution, then SQL Server, then Advanced:

And say goodbye to those messages.

2025-09-02