Wayne’s Tips and Tricks for SSMS
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS ) is a program that many just launch daily (or only when they restart their computer), and they use it to navigate to various SQL Servers to manage them, either through the GUI or through a query. I’ve found that most people are just not aware of all that SSMS can do to help you be more productive. Therefore, I’m going to be posting a SSMS tip or trick daily for the month of January. I just couldn’t help myself – there’s so many more things that can be done in SSMS that I’m going to keep on adding to this series. It won’t be daily, but keep an eye out for more tips! Let me know if you would also like to for me to cover tools that integrate with SSMS.
During this month-long blog series, I’ll show many tips that SSMS can do that will help you improve your productivity. These tips do not require any third-party tools. I’ll be using this post as a landing page for the series, and I’ll be updating it daily. So, come back every day to get your next SSMS tips fix. To make it even easier, you can use this link to return to this page: bit.ly/MonthOfSSMS. And because I like giving you options, you can also use ssms.waynesheffield.com to jump to this page also.
Bonus Tip: Did you know that SSMS is now distributed independently from SQL Server? It is a free download, and can be installed in parallel with other versions of SSMS. It is compatible with SQL Server 2008+. While it doesn’t block access to SQL Server 2000 or 2005, some features might not work correctly.
Day One: SSMS Solutions
Day Two: Split Screens
Day Three: Tab Groups
Day Four: Pinned Tabs
Day Five: Working with Query Files
Day Six: Vertical Scroll Bar Map Mode
Day Seven: Template Variables
Day Eight: SQLCMD Mode
Day Nine: Multi-Server Queries
Day Ten: Regular Expressions
Day Eleven: Block Select/Replace
Day Twelve: Changing case
Day Thirteen: The SSMS Super Clipboard
Day Fourteen: Object Explorer Drag-N-Drop
Day Fifteen: Query Shortcuts in SSMS
Day Sixteen: Assign a keyboard shortcut to menu items
Day Seventeen: Add color to connections
Day Eighteen: Template Explorer
Day Nineteen: Use Snippets in SSMS to insert blocks of code
Day Twenty: Object Explorer Filtering
Day Twenty-One: Object Explorer Details
Day Twenty-Two: Outlining
Day Twenty-Three: Quick Editing Tips
Day Twenty-Four: Using Bookmarks to navigate code in SSMS
Day Twenty-Five: Using the SSMS Web Browser
Day Twenty-Six: Working with Comments
Day Twenty-Seven: Comparing Query Plans
Day Twenty-Eight: Saving SSMS Settings
Day Twenty-Nine: Presenting with SSMS
Day Thirty: Reports in SSMS
Day Thirty-One: SSMS Activity Monitor
Day Thirty-Two: Controlling what appears in the status bar and query tabs
Day Thirty-Three: Using the Full Screen Mode in SSMS
Day Thirty-Four: Working with tabs and spaces in SSMS
Day Thirty-Five: SSMS Batch Separator
Day Thirty-Six: Removing servers from the SSMS connection dialog
Day Thirty-Seven: SSMS Reset window layout
The bit.ly url is broken or not working. Can you look into it? //bit.ly/MonthOfSSMS
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Hi George,
It’s working now. I forgot to go get the bitly after the post went live – thanks for catching that for me.
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Hello Wayne,
thanks a million for your tipps on SSMS.
Best regards
Gerald
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This is great, thanks for posting these!
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Thanks Wayne for this series. I had seen much of it before but I still got so much out of the series. I found the posts on Regular Expressions, Comparing Query Plans, and Presenting with SSMS to be really useful and very, very informative. Thanks again for taking the time to create this series.
Lee
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Thanks Lee. It’s amazing to me when I do this presentation all the things that people say that they didn’t know that SSMS could do. That’s why I decided to do this series., and why it will continue.
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I’ve got to admit, you’re the king of SSMS usability. Thanks for putting this very convenient and use series together, Wayne.
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Thanks Jeff. What did you learn?
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Wayne – Do you know if it is possible to get an Install of the SSMS that came with SQL 2016 anywhere? SSMS 18.X is horrible and crashes more than it connects to SSAS and SSIS instances.
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From the SQL 2016 installation media – just install only the tools.
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PhyDataDba – SSMS no longer comes with SQL installation media as of 2016. However, Microsoft does offer prior version downloads prior to 18.X. From the “Download SSMS” page, scroll down to the bottom of the page and there is a link to “Previous SSMS releases”. They offer version 17.9.1 download and also 16.5.3 at the bottom of that page.
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