1. So I load it up, add a few sql servers to it. Mess around, close it, open it again and lo and behold it didn't bother to keep any of my settings or any of the SQL Servers that I had added and anoyingly asks me for login information to add another one. Unless I'm missing something, you just threw out one of the best parts of Enterprise Manager. Please someone tell me how to fix this so that it works the way it should. (and someone else, i.e. Microsoft, make it the default behaviour to add and save any sql servers and bring them up the next time, this is nuts)
2. So I go to do what I normally do which is to use the Query Designer to build a query so that I can copy and paste it into my code in Vs.net. Right click on a table, no query designer, so I find the Query button in the toolbar.... great, except it brings up a text window that I get to type things, and the database wasn't even set right even though I clearly had a database selected below and was on a table in it! So I manually set the table... and then I right click on the table and choose the Query Designer by hand. It doesn't load in the query that I had written by hand into the stupid text editor so I have to close it and then copy it to the clipboard and then paste it into the query editor. Then I try and see the results that i'm going to get. Nope, the Execute SQL Command on right click is grayed out and doesn't work. So I have to save it, go back to the stupid text editor and then right click and choose Execute. All told you've added about a million steps to the process and wasted a ton of time. Someone please tell me how to edit the Query Designer to the right click of a table and have it bring up that table by default and enable the "Execute SQL" option on the Query Designer. (and no, I don't use VS.net to do this, because Vs.net tacks on the stupid "dbo." on every table and every object, thus making the designer completely and utterly useless.
3. Going to fonts and colors in the options window (despirately trying to find how to fix all of this stupid stuff that should be the default) took 45 seconds just to load the tab.... brilliant.
4. The interface is completely mind boggling. One minute it opens on the right hand side beside the list on the left, the next it brings up a dialog with no rhyme or reason. Query Designer should show up on the right, as should the properties for a table or Database. (i.e. if "Modify" (which is more properly "Design") on a table opens on the right, then properties should too. There just is no logic to it. Someone didn't bother to do usability tests on this thing.
5. I tried to save a solution with this tool thinking that that might get me my databases saved so that the next time it would reload the same solution with the databases. Nope, it didn't reload the solution on open, and it still prompted me for a database to connect to and all of my old databases were gone, and when I went and manually loaded the solution it poped up a properties bar on the right that was empty, so essentially it saved nothing, did nothing and is a hold over from VS.net or something which this thing sort of appears to sometimes think that it is....
6. 6th try I realized that if you go to view this is this view item for "Registered Servers" which shows me a list of servers that I can add too... great, but it still prompts me to connect to a database server on load so I have to cancel it and I cannot find anywhere to get it to leave me alone and it wasn't at all discoverable and the default settings isn't how anyone would use the thing or expect it to work, especially your old customers that are used to Enterprise Manager. And oh, btw, the interface is stilly because you have to know to double click on the database server to get it to show up in the object explorer. Enterprise manager was vastly superior because it was in one list and you just expanded the item and you got everything. much much more intelligently designed.
If these things are not fixable, you've just doubled the amount of keystrokes and work I have to do every time I use Enterprise Manager (by any other name) and thus I don't care what new functionality is in SQL Sever 2005, you've just lost me and I will not be using SQL Server 2005 and I will be strongly recommending to all of our clients that they not switch, because the tools make you do more work, and make basic tasks that were easy in SQL Server 2000 a major pain in the ***. That's not progress, and that's not worth the upgrade fee no matter what else I can do in SQL Server 2005 that I could do with third party tools and can still do better and faster now. (i.e. Report Services)
As to the point if they are fixable, why the heck are they not the default? (In the beta I bitched about this stuff too, and it's gotten worse, not better!) What I do is not unusual and I would guess probably accounts for about 80% of the use of Enterprise manager currently today and you've made it a pain in the ***. Fix this stuff. I can't believe the collasal screw ups that I've been finding in VS.net and SQL Server 2005. This product is not ready for prime time and shows a clear lack of understanding by microsoft on how people use their tools. (I did a poll of about 15 programmers I know that use SQL Server 2005 and Vs.net and they all said that what I describe above is how they use Enteprise manager themselves, so I'm not out in left field here.)
Overall, the beta program for both VS.net and SQL Server 2005 was very dissatisfying because MS was not interested in feedback and major regresssions have been added to functionality and stability in this release (I crashed VS.net 2005 20 times in the first 2 hours of using it, and yes I'm using the final.). And now the final versions demonstrate that Microsoft, for all of their increased feedback, failed to get it and just went and did their own thing, and the people who get to pay for it are screwed. MySQL is looking better and better all of the time... Especially because I can install it on a machine and have one Add/Remove programs entry instead of 50 (yes exageration but not by much).
I honestly keep looking in my start menu for something else that will actually work intelligently that I'm missing. This thing is the worst of Enterprise Manager and Query Analyser combined and thus a complete failure. I'm sure there are a whole pile of third party developers that are thanking you guys at Microsoft right now for creating a whole now genre of applications to be able to work with SQL Server databases intelligently. I know that just like Grids and DataTimePickers in WinForms that it will be a booming market in just a few months...
Don't get me wrong, Enterprise Manager was no triumph of usability itself, but at least it worked and allowed you to get your job done and not waste your time constantly with click and after click after click of stupid things.
I really am sorry to be so down on you guys, but come on. This is basic workflow and you just don't get it. Somehow, the POS that was Query Analyser which was only good for a very limited number of things, ended up running the show instead of Enterprise manager just getting the last little bits of Query Analyser that it didn't have and the end result is a barberic tool that is useless for all but the most basic tasks and even those are a pain in the ***. Whomever decided that the guys in charge of Query Analyser should be in charge of replacing Enterprise Manager should be drawn and quartered, it was a very very stupid decision.
What you've effectively done now is made it so that I have to buy the second most expensive database system out there (second only to Oracle), and then I have to then buy a 3rd party tool just to use the database system that I bought. If you can explain why I would waste my money doing so I would love to see the spin. In the mean time I can get MySQL for free, and buy a 3rd party tool that is vastly supriorer to this *** you call Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, and a really advanced report writter and replace almost everything else in SQL Server 2005 with 3rd party tools and still do so for a quarter of the cost and on the end user's machine, when I distribute this to clients, they have 0 costs because they don't need anything but the runtime versions of stuff. You always had to fight that argument. But in the past, the design tools were better, the integration with Vs.net was better, and the functionality was better. Now none of these things are true with MySQL 5 out now. Oh ya, and I still can't deterministically install SQL Express in my Windows Installer package because you require bootstrapping which just confuses users and completely fails to accomodate Smart Clients at all.... nice work.
*not a happy camper*
You can perist your favorite servers in the Registered Servers tool. You can display this using View | Registered Servers. Once your server is registered, you can double click it and connect in Object Explorer or right click on it and interact in other ways.
To edit the data in a particular table, right click on the table and select "Open Table". To create a general query, right click on the database node in Object Explorer and select "New Query". If you want a graphical query designer, type some text (say, "select"), highlight the text, right click on the highlight, and select "Design Query in Editor..." to start a Query Designer dialog.
You can drag the Registered Server and Object Explorer windows whereever you want them on the desktop. Management Studio should remember where you put them last and put them there the next time you start.
You can avoid the initial prompt for a database if you configure SSMS to initially start with an "empty environment". In this case, you will see the Registered Servers window (if you've chosen to display it) and the Object Explorer window, but SSMS will not try to automatically connect to any server. This has the added benefit of starting the the shell much faster than the default configuration. You can configure the startup options in Tools | Options | Environment | General. Select "Open Empty Environment" in the "At startup" dropdown to start Management Studio without trying to connect to anything.
|||I'm also a bit underwhelmed by the SQL Server Management Studio. But I don't think they started with Query Analyzer, as the basics of Query Analyzer aren't even in there (unless someone can point me in the right direction). No coloring of syntax, adds crude attempts to reformat the query, etc. Looks more like they started with Access or the crude designer in SQL Server 2000 EM which I avoided like the plague.
There are 3 main users of SQL Server:
1. Developers trying to write programs to access the DB. Only a few are SQL experts - most just try to get the query to run, or use the built in features of .NET to do the data access. A bit of hacking away till the job is done.
2. SQL Developers - these folks understand stored procedures, T-SQL, read the magazines, think Itzikk Ben-Gan is really cool, etc. They think Query Analyzer is good enough for most things, and hate the query designers from SQL EM because they are brain dead.
3. DBAs - these folks know things like file groups, index structures, SQL Profiler, can fix the SQL code the developers hacked up, etc.
Each of the above need different features. All are kind of glommed together in both VS2005 and Management studio. I'm all for code reuse, but we're talking some serious steps backwards here.
The good news is that for most things the old SQL 2000 Query Analyzer still works.
|||Functionality of the query editor should be comparable to (or even better than) the editor in Query Analyzer 2000. The query editor has color syntax highlighting and shouldn't be reformatting anything - it's just the Visual Studio code editor with SQL syntax rules. If you set the keyboard scheme to "SQL Server 2000" in the Tools | Options | Keyboard dialog page, the keyboard shortcuts should be the same as in QA2000 as well.You can get to the query editor by right clicking on a database and selecting "New Query" or by clicking the New Query button in the button bar. You can also get to the query editor by right clicking on a stored procedure, function, table, etc. in the object explorer and selecting "Script * as" > "Create to" > "New Query Editor Window". This will create an editor window with SQL to create the object. You can script Alters, Drops, Selects, etc. in the same way.
The query designer dialog that you see when you right click on a table and select Open Table or when you highlight text in the query editor and select "Design Query in Editor" is also from Visual Studio. It is also used in Access. It doesn't have color syntax highlighting, but it does provide a smart GUI to design queries in, including diagramming the base tables. It does reformat SQL, but that is a function of it generating the SQL in the query from the metadata in the other panes of the designer. The designer makes it easier to write complex and lengthy queries using a "Query By Example" metaphor, so if it didn't make an effort to format the SQL it generates, it would be very hard to know if it was really doing what you wanted it to do. This is probably a feature most appropriate for your first group of non-expert SQL users. Users who don't find this kind of functionality helpful aren't required to use it - the SQL editor is supposed to be sufficient on its own to do what they need to do.
Our goal was to make editing T-SQL in Management Studio better than the editing experience in Query Analyzer by moving to a more capable editing platform from Visual Studio. If there is any functionality in QA that you are missing in the Management Studio query editor, we'd like to hear about it.|||You're right - thanks! I just was in the wrong place.
My confusion came from the following (and I don't think you'll find me alone...).
I'm browsing the database, and look at a table. I want to see what is in the table. I have only one option - "open" the table. Once I'm there, I'm stuck. I don't have any convenient way to do anything with the table, and the only thing on the Menu that I see is Query Designer - which is what led me into confusion and depression. I looked under "Tools", which is where the old Query Analyzer was, and find nothing. I look under Query Designer - and find nothing. I never thought of selecting "New Query", as I don't want a new query - I want to see the data in Query Analyzer.
All you need to do is add a right click option to say "Open table results in New Query window" (and something on the menu as well). and you'll make a lot of people happy, plus help them find this tool. It should open the table with a select * from [table name] and life is good.
HTH|||What's missing in SSMS?
We use Query Analyzer to compile stored procedures or run conversion scripts when we install new software. We don't need any "solutions". We would just like to be able to load files one after another and execute them without getting a new connection for each.
We also use Query Analyzer for quick ad hoc queries when investigating problems. Being prompted to save the query window when closing the program is not only a waste of time, it's dangerous because the most likely result is that you overwrite some file that was previously loaded in the window. Query Analyzer gave us the option of turning off this prompt.|||
configure SSMS to initially start with an "empty environment".
I did this and SSMS still Polls the servers to find out if SQL is running. In Enterprise Manager, we were able to turn this polling off. Is there any way to do that in SSMS?
|||Was there ever any resolution found to the polling problem? With a team of developers all using SSMS, the event log of our development database server is being flooded with logon/logoff events from each developer.
Thanks,
|||If you right mouse click on Open Table and make the Diagram Pane, Criteria Pane, and SQL Panes visible, I should now be able to click on the Change Type dropdown to select the type of query I want to build such as Select, Insert Results, Insert Values, Update, Delete or Make Table like it did in Enterprise Manager. However the dropdown list is DISABLED. If I make the Query Properties window have focus, then the Change Type dropdown is enabled, but all the options in the list are disabled.
This feature was available from Enterprise Manager Query Tool using the same basic steps. Is this a bug in SQL Server 2005, or have I missed something?
|||And how would I get this to remember what I want for every time I use it?And how would I set this as the default for Open Query? I don't want to open the entire table, I want to build a query and look at the results. At least some of which of the query, I'll build using the designer...
This is my point to how much this whole thing doesn't make sense and wasn't thought out at all...
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