Intro

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a great product. Out of the box SSMS is an awesome tool that many of us have come to know and love. In my quest for efficiency I have found some very helpful settings that can be changed. If you spend most of your day in SSMS like I do, these changes can help you be more productive.

Version

First and foremost is the version you are running. If you aren’t running the latest version of SSMS go download it now. It’s free! SSMS has received a lot of love from Microsoft over the last couple years. Now updates come out regularly instead of with the SQL Server release cycle. If you are still running SSMS 2005 I’m begging you to go download the latest version and give it a try.

Line Numbers

Next up is line numbers. A basic necessity for any code editor. Now when SSMS tells you there is an error on line 2746 you can actually find it! Sharing code with a colleague becomes easier because you can reference specific lines.

Tools → Options → Text Editor → Transact-SQL → Line Numbers

Clean Tabs

Tab names are way too crowded. We can remove a lot of the repetitive information to make the tab names easier to read and mentally organize.

Tools → Options → Text Editor → Editor Tab and Status Bar → Tab Text

Two Rows of Tabs

Having a million tabs open can be painful to sort through. You can double up your tab real estate by enabling pinned tabs in a separate row. Instantly makes SSMS easier to multitask with.

Tools → Options → Environment → Tabs and Windows → Show pinned tabs in a separate window

SQL Search

To make anything in SQL Server easier to find I use SQL Search. It’s a free add-in for SSMS provided by Red Gate. The free download and documentation can be found at the link below. SQL Search will search through every object in SQL Server for the search term you enter.

SQL Prompt

SQL Prompt is the only paid tool in my arsenal. This tool is also made by Red Gate. The value it brings easily justifies the cost. There are so many features, my favorite 3 are Tab History, Object Inspection and Code Formatting.

Tab history is such a life saver. If you have ever accidentally closed a tab without saving or had your PC shutdown before saving, you know where I am coming from with this. You can quickly and easily access all your recent tabs whether you saved them or not.

Having object inspection is really handy. It takes intellisense to the next level. When you’re typing out a statement that refers to an object it will provide a list of available objects that match what you have typed so far. On top of that you can hover over the suggested objects and see their definition. For example you could see a table’s columns and their data types. It will even give you the create script.

Last but not least is code formatting. With the click of a button you can take a horribly formatted T-SQL statement and have it format it in seconds. You can even customize the style for its formatting. The time saved in properly formatting a statement is priceless.

Conclusion

This is how I configure SSMS for my day to day work. I hope you find some of these settings useful. Let me know in the comments which ones you liked the best!