SSMS is a great tool and it has lots of helpful menu items and toolbar items. Unfortunately, all these items take up screen real estate.
Even though you can get more screen real estate for editing, by unpinning the windows on each side, you can see that the default screen layout could be considered a bit cluttered if you really just want to focus on the particular query that you’re working on.
2025-06-20
Years ago, I had the privilege of presenting “what’s new in SQL Server” sessions at many locations around the world. When presenting sessions, you can sometimes learn as much as you teach. What I learned while delivering those sessions is that the product group sees what’s important in a release very differently to what the attendees do.
Each time there’s a new version of SQL Server, there will normally be three or four marketing pillars (groups of functionality), and each will have about eight to ten bullet points.
2025-06-18
In another section, I’ve described ways to configure the scroll bar in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There is another key option that I haven’t discussed previously: map mode. By default, the scroll bar shows the changes, syntax errors, etc:
If you have a long script though, it can be hard to visualize what’s in the other parts of the script. Map mode can help with this.
Right-click the scroll bar and choose Scroll Bar Options:
2025-06-16
In an earlier post, I described how I didn’t particularly like all the colors that are shown in the scroll bar now in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):
In that post, I described how to turn them all off, or at least how to kill off some of them. But, of course they are there for a reason.
Instead of turning them all off, you might decide to make sense of what they are there for. The colors that are displayed indicate the following:
2025-06-14
It’s great that SQL Server Management Studio has moved into the latest Visual Studio shell. Unfortunately, there are one or two things that are a little harder at first for people who want to use SSMS to write T-SQL. One that was driving me crazy was the scroll bar.
Visual Studio tries to give so much information on that bar, about what’s changed, where the insertion carat is, etc. The problem with this is that I often now can’t even find the handle when I want to scroll the window. For example, how do you grab the handle with your mouse and slide the window when it looks like this?
2025-06-12
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a highly configurable tool. One of the areas that’s often ignored but which can be quite important is color configuration.
SSMS color codes SQL scripts (and other types of files that it understands) as you type.
This is really useful but I’ve found on some systems that some of the color selections aren’t great. Here’s an example:
On many systems that I work with, depending upon the version, the color for sys.tables in the query above is quite a fluoro green and almost unreadable. The default from v21 onwards is much better but if you don’t like it, you can change it.
2025-06-10
I spend a lot of time delivering presentations of various types. Many of those presentations involve showing code in either SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or Visual Studio (VS).
I’ve become quite fast at taking a default setup of SSMS and changing it to the fonts, etc. that I want to use for a presentation. Given how large these fonts are, I don’t want to use them for day-to-day work.
2025-06-08
Whenever I need to work on a new laptop or server, or whenever I change versions of SQL Server Management Studio, I kick myself for not remembering to export my settings, so I can import them again.
I spend quite a bit of effort getting SSMS configured the way I want, so it only makes sense to save the settings. Saving them isn’t perfect but it’s far better than not having done it.
2025-06-06
The status bar at the bottom of a query window in SQL Server Management Studio contains a wealth of information in its default configuration. The bottom left shows the connection state:
And the bottom right shows quite a bit:
In this case, it’s showing me that I’m connected to a server (local)\SQL2022; it’s running v16 of SQL Server (ie: SQL Server 2022); I’m logged on as GREG7680\Greg; my SPID (or session ID) is 88; and I’m connected to the WideWorldImporters database.
2025-06-04
I’ve been very lucky over the years because I haven’t needed to wear glasses. Every now and then I purchase a pair because I thought it might help with reading. Once I get them though, I find them more inconvenient than helpful and stop using them. I’ve am long-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other. That’s turned out to be a really useful thing in day to day life.
2025-06-02
