If you ever have long scripts in SQL Server Management Studio and need to refer to a particular line, it can be helpful to have line numbers shown. This is even more useful if you ever need to write a set of instructions for someone on how to modify a query, or if you are trying to describe how a query works.
Instead of having a query like this:
2025-06-28
One feature that many developers have been asking the SSMS team for, is the ability to use a dark mode.
Instead of a screen that looks like this:
They wanted a screen that looks like this:
This capability is now present in SSMS. In Tools then Options then Environment then General, you can now choose a Color Theme:
Note that there are several themes now available, including a new extra contrast option.
2025-06-26
When working with SQL Server Management Studio, sometimes you need to show someone else what you’re working on, and the fonts that you’re using are just too small for someone looking over your shoulder or looking at a screen that you’ve shared with them.
What I often see someone do then, is to go into Tools and Options and start to change the font and color settings. The pain with this is that you then need to set them back later.
2025-06-24
Code quality has always been an important topic ever since coding began. Code complexity is an important part of this. One of the topics that came up many years ago was a discussion on what length procedures or functions should be, before they became too difficult to follow.
I remember one guy commenting that he thought as soon as all the code didn’t fit on your screen any more, you were much more likely to have bugs in it. At the time, screens weren’t all that big.
2025-06-22
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
