Management Studio 2008- What I Like

on June 1, 2009

There’s some pretty cool things about SSMS 2008– I am really pleased that execution plans open graphically by default now, and it’s easy to view the XML on demand. I had gotten pretty fast at saving things as .sqlplan, but it was a bit of a drag.

But my very favorite thing is really simple. I’m not sure if it even made it into the ‘feature lists’ anywhere. It’s this:

  • When you are running a query in a tab, the top of the tab has the note as ‘Executing’ until it completes.

Whomever got in this feature has my sincere and heartfelt thanks. This is incredibly useful to me. I frequently need to run manual commands to verify data to troubleshoot things that shouldn’t be automated, and it’s really nice to be able to move to another tab and periodically glance at the tab header to see when it completes. No more clicking back to  it, or running sp_who2 if I happen to be on the same server.