SNESSUG March Meeting
Aaron Bertrand showed up to teach us tips and tricks for SQL Server Management Studio. We had to move our meeting night because of a conflict at our wonderful host, New England Tech. But we still had 12 people show up. For SNESSUG, that was a good turnout. I gave away some swag that I had received from Microsoft and some stuff that we had purchased. Bribary works (at least that’s my theory, so feel free to bribe me, whenever).
Aaron’s presentation was great. He’s just showing nothing but meat. There’s no fluff. He’s just showing a series of tips & tricks in SSMS and explains why you want to use them. First revelation, -nosplash has no effect whatsoever on load time. He called it a placebo. It just kept going from there. Aaron’s stated goal was to make everyone in the audience say “wow” or “cool” at some point during the presentation. I’m pretty sure he succeeded. The first one that got a lot of people is when he demonstrated setting the connection color so you can track different connections visually on your screen. My personal one was the Registered Servers import list so you can maintain a common list, move copies around, share registered server lists within your team… I love learning stuff at a good presentation.
Oh yeah, and everyone said “wow” or “cool” at least once.
Excel Within Management Studio
Aaron Bertrand has put in a Connect request for a feature whereby data returned as a grid from a query can just go right into an Excel spreadsheet. All in favor? Opposed? Motion passed. Go and vote this one up, up, up.
SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Trick
I just had a Tremors moment. “Everybody knows about ’em Earl, we just never told you.” Except that no one I showed it to has ever seen it before. So maybe this is something a little new.
I had a database selected in the Object Explorer window and I had the Object Explorer Details window open. I noticed a little icon at the bottom of the screen:
Then I saw that the bar above it was a moveable bar. So I moved it and saw this:
Whoa! So then I tried a table, HumanResources.Department from AdventureWorks2008:
Which caused me to check a procedure:
Each line has a little icon on the side that lets you copy it, line by line. It’s really just a way to display the basic properties about the object in a readily accessible format. It’s not going to change my life, or yours, but it sure is handy to know a quick way to access some basic information.
Performance Studio
I just found out about some new functionality coming out in SQL Server 2008 called Performance Studio. It’s actually largely a framework around which you can build performance monitoring routines for an entire enterprise. This sounds terrific. I’m going to dig into a bit and make it my presentation for the Heroes {Community} Launch event at SNESSUG next week. Here’s a Technet webcast on the topic. Here’s a very nice blog entry over at SQLTeam (I suppose I should ad them to my blog roll) discussing the function of the Data Collector, the foundation for this new framework. Performance Studio only works with 2008 systems though, so that’s something to take into account. Although I see an interview with Brad McGehee that says it’s not enterprise ready. Another something to take into account.
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