I think Microsoft Sql Server Management Studio is a great tool for managing Sql Server, writing and optimizing Transact Sql code and for anything with Sql Server but I have always missed some functions:
- Formatting Sql code
- Code Snippets (Like in Visual Studio)
- CRUD Stored Procedure generation
Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter for formatting Sql code.
SSMS Tools Pack for the others.
Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter is a free add in that formats Sql scripts with a single hotkey. As Visual Studio, we can format the whole document or just the selected part of it.
After the installation it puts two entries into the SSMS Tools menu: Format T-SQL Code and T-SQL Formatting Options.
These are my personal settings. I have changed the default hotkey to CTRL+K, CTRL+D and unchecked all the extras, because the default settings were uncomfortable for me (This hotkey is the same as the debugging hotkey in SSMS Tools Pack but I disabled this function because I think I wont use it).
It also has a free web service for testing at poorsql.com.
SSMS Tools Pack is also a free add-in created by Mladen Prajdić SQL Server MVP. It has a lot of features but for me the most importants are:
- Execution Plan Analyzer!!!!!!! (Verry important)
- SQL Snippets (Fires on Enter – as default – or Tab key)
- Search Results in Grid Mode
- CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) stored procedure generation
- And a lot of other good stuff
.
Summary: I recommend installing these to everybody who uses SQL Server. SSMS Tools Pack works with every version of SQL Server from SQL Server 2005 (as the install shows), and unfortunately I don’t have any information about Poor Mans T-SQL Formatter but I tried it with SQL Server 2008 and it worked fine for me.
Note: EVERYBODY has to try the Execution Plan Analyzer, it is really-really worth it.
The download links are:
Happy Coding!
Morzel
