Ssms-Tips-Tricks

SSMS keeps a list of the server names that you have connected to, and prompts you with those when you drop-down the list while making a connection:

Eventually, that list can either become messy, it can include servers that don’t exist anymore, and so on. You might want to clear up the list.

To do this in early versions of SSMS, you needed to locate the SqlStudio.bin file from the Documents and Settings area in your user profile. Fortunately, that’s no longer required. In more recent versions, all you needed to do was to open this dialog, arrow down to the ones that you want to remove, and hit the Delete key.

2025-09-16

In SSMS, when you click New Query, a new query window is opened, but because it’s blank, what might not be immediately obvious is that it’s based on a template.

The location of the template depends upon the version, but for SSMS 17.6, you’ll find it in this folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 21\Release\Common7\IDE\NewFileItems\SQLFile.sql

The file is called SQLFile.sql. If it’s not in the location above, just search for SQLFile.sql.

2025-09-14

SQL Server execution plans can become quite large. That makes them hard to navigate because you are endlessly scrolling around the results pane in SSMS.

The pane does have some zoom features. Note that if I right-click in the whitespace, I get these options:

So I can zoom in and out, set a custom zoom level, or zoom until the entire plan fits. Generally though, that would make the plan too small to read, as soon as you have a complicated plan.

2025-09-12

In an earlier post, I described how query plans could be saved as .sqlplan file, shared, and loaded again in SSMS. It’s also possible to extract them out of SQL Server Profiler or Extended Events Profiler.

This is useful, but the same applies to deadlock graphs. SQL Server 2005 added Deadlock graph as a type of event in SQL Server Profiler. (It’s also part of Extended Events Profiler).

If I open a new trace in Profiler, I can add Deadlock graph to the list of events:

2025-09-10

SQL Server query plans are stored as XML. You can see what they look like by right-clicking in any query plan in SSMS, and clicking Show Execution Plan XML:

That will return a whole bunch of XML like this:

It’s important to understand that when SSMS is showing a graphical execution plan, it’s just graphically rendering some XML like the plan above.

The Properties window in SSMS is also showing details extracted from that same XML.

2025-09-08

I’ve mentioned before that SSMS is a good tool for analyzing queries, as much as for executing them.

Way back in SQL Server 2005, query plans had missing index details added. When a query plan was created, SQL Server recorded that it thought it could have executed the query better, if only you’d provided it with appropriate indexes. But at that point, the suggestions weren’t very good, and the tools didn’t show them.

2025-09-06

One of the advantages of SSMS is that it can be used to analyze queries, not just to execute them.

There are two basic types of query plan: estimated execution plans, and actual execution plans.

For a typical query, I can obtain the estimated execution plan, by hitting Ctrl-L, choosing the option in the Query menu, or clicking on the toolbar icon:

Let’s do this for the following query:

2025-09-04

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.

2025-09-02

In SSMS, query results are normally shown at the bottom of the query window.

This can greatly reduce the screen real estate both for the query, and for viewing the results.

In Tools, Options, Query Results, SQL Server, Results to Grid, there is an option to Display results in a separate tab. This can be very useful and generally you will also want to choose the extra option to Switch to results tab after the query executes.

2025-08-31

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.

2025-08-29