Ssms-Tips-Tricks

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

The built-in reports in SQL Server Management Studio are great but you can add your own as well. SQL Server 2005 and later have an option for Custom Reports. Let’s create a report that shows the use of deprecated data types. We’ll use a stored procedure from our free SDU Tools to do that. In SQL Server Data Tools, create a new Report Server project.

Give the project an appropriate name and location, then click Create.

2025-05-31

SQL Server Management Studio provides a large amount of information about databases by letting the user navigate around Object Explorer and view the properties of objects.

What I’m often surprized by though, is the number of users who haven’t ever explored the reports that are available. In another section, we’ll look at creating custom reports, but there is a wonderful set of built-in standard reports that you should explore. For example, if I right-click the WideWorldImporters database, I can see these reports:

2025-05-29

In early versions of SQL Server, the only way to try to track dependencies between tables, procedures, functions, etc. was to use the sp_depends stored procedure.

And everyone thought it lied.

The real problem was that it didn’t understand partial dependencies and deferred resolution of objects. For example, it got confused if you created a procedure that mentioned a table, then later created the table.

SQL Server 2012 introduced far superior dependency views, and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) shows dependencies using those views under the covers.

2025-05-27