Forget everything I said earlier about SQL Server 2005 Management Studio (herein referred to as MS from now on); it’s slow, bloated, and just all around pathetic.  It seemed great at first, but after having done some heavy lifting with it lately it just seems…well, geared for idiots.  It’s just really been dumbed down to the point looking like Access (no offense to the Access folks).  Getting anything done takes an insane amount of clicks, and it just feels soooo slow compared to Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer…very simple tasks take forever to finish up (for example, backing up a database…MS makes Enterprise Manager seem like a Ferrari).  I never thought I’d say this, but I actually miss QA at this point.

The latest thing that made me go wtf was the following:  I needed to load up some 40 SQL statements for execution earlier today…normally I would just load them into a new Visual Studio database project, select them all and run them…works beautifully.  Unfortunately VS2003 can’t connect/communicate with SQL2005 (Microsoft, if you’re reading this (and I know you do sometimes), please back port this into VS2003, not all of us will be using VS2005 strictly on our SQL2005 databases), so I had to recreate my database project in VS2005 and trying to add all the SQL files to the project threw an error (the generic “parameter not supported” error if anyone is keeping score) which was a real bummer.

So I selected all of the .sql files and opened them…instead of getting one MS instance with 40 tabs, wouldn’t you know that I got…you guessed it, 40 instances of MS, and each instance of course challenged me for authorization credentials so I couldn’t just right click the grouping on the task bar and close the entire group…I had to go through one by one and click connect (or cancel), then close the window.  Next attempt:  Open a single instance of MS and open the files from within the instance.  Un-bloody-f’ing real…they do indeed open up in individual tabs now, but I again get prompted for authorization creds for each file, and only 6 tabs are displayed below the menu bar.  It took a few seconds to find the very uintuitively placed icon that lets you see the rest of the windows, albeit in list form and not tabs.  Come on guys…after opening up tons of tabs in VS, you are given the very pleasant option of scrolling to the left/right to see hidden tabs and just all around easier to use.

So then after clicking the connect button 40 more times I start the task of running each statement.  First tab: I select the database I need from the dropdown, run the statements, go to the next tab…and the database selection is reset to “Master”…I have dozens of databases so doing this on each tab simply isn’t feasible, so I go off searching for a setting that allows me to specify the database to use for my MS session.  Oh wait…there isn’t one.  At this point I’m ready to fire up osql (where you can specify command switches which are session wide) and write my own batch file that does this for me.  Thinking that I’m probably not the only person on the planet who needs to run an entire folder of .sql files, I Googled around and found this great little utility that does it for me, which does exactly what I want it do on the first try.

While I’m griping, why doesn’t double clicking most objects (tables/sprocs/etc) in MS object explorer do anything…like maybe open the object and let me do something with it?  If I double click a table, it should either open in design view, or show me the data in it…doubling clicking a sproc should show me the sql statements, right?  No, you have to right click the object and choose from one of the menu commands now…no defaults.  And also gone is the “TOP” option when you open a table…if it has a gazillion rows in it, you’re gonna get all gazillion of them (well, you can click stop at anytime, but that’s still pretty pathetic)…if I’m in Enterprise Manager/Mgmt Studio, chances are good I’m just needing some quick and dirty data to look at, so give me the option.  It is very much worth mentioning that I usually do stuff like this from raw SQL statements in QA, but if I just need something quickly I’ll use EM/MS.  At first I really liked the integration of QA/EM into one tool, but now I’m absolutely craving separation again.  QA was quick, easy to use, and just all around fantastic compared to the query windows in MS.

Ok, enough ranting…but feel free to chime in, and if you know of any other SQL2005 rant posts out there please let me know as I’d very much like to see what other people have to say about it.  Cheers.

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