MicrosoftHi Erin.. I don’t envy your position having to respond to some of these comments. I use SSMS a lot! I’ve been using some version of the MSSQL supplied ‘management’ tool since SQL 2000. And I get that the SSMS tool is likely a ‘monstrosity’ to change. People should not forget that SSMS connects and interacts with not only SQL Server, but SSAS, SSRS and SQL Agent (to name a few) so it's a complex beast. I would even bet that a lot of people don’t even use SSMS to it’s full ‘real’ potential. That being said, I must agree that SSMS has lagged in provided key improvements over the years.
I’ve submitted ‘ideas / request’ to the feedback forums before (a long time ago) and never saw or heard anything. So, sorry... I’ve given up on those. I also find there’s a lot of submitted requests that just sound silly or petty. So not knowing if those are requests are getting the ‘eyeballs’ just makes me think that adding in my own stuff is likely to be a waste of time. (I guess I naively think the MS folk will add the seemingly logical value-added stuff in due time).
I see someone asking for data statistics on returned data sets in the results window. (show aggregate results, group data, etc.) I had a good laugh... why not just write a query to return those numbers. After all it is a SQL server.
One example that I think would be a real value-added feature would be a way to easily export results sets to something like, say Excel. I currently pay for a subscription to SQLPrompt and make heavy use that very feature to do that. And I am not talking about sending huge datasets to Excel for analytics. I am always running DBCC commands or other ‘management’ based queries that I then export for other purposes. Not sure when MS is going to start trying to move pure ‘data’ query people to Azure ‘Data’ Studio and off SSMS. Just consider that the name is SQL Server ‘Management’ Studio. Its primary use should be to ‘Manage’ SQL Servers. (and it does that quite well). People that want to just wrangle data from SQL Server databases, should go to ADS. (Btw. it has a dark theme)
As for all the dark theme comments, yes... a dark theme in SSMS would be nice, but give me a break. I am an old (old) veteran of computing. I started on a PDP-11 in university and worked on IBM S/370’s and everything else you could imagine, and the user interfaces weren’t ‘dark themed’ but we still got lots and lots of productive coding done. The ‘we need a dark theme to do our work’ mantra borders on a vanity request.
My suggestion.. make SSMS do more SQL Server 'Management' functions better and forget about the data wranglers.
Overall... SSMS does an amazing job. But as usual, we all want it to do more.
For what it's worth here's some quick snippets of my enhancement request...
1. Better Query Tab options... like having multiple rows of tabs.... and/or a 'good' special window or view to manage tabs... plus a tab history feature (SQLPrompt has this.. it is fantastic)
2.Better functionality in the Template browser... I keep template queries by functional use cases but keeping them organized is painful.
3.Make the Solution and Project handling more intuitive and have better features. It's a horror story trying to use Solution Explorer.
4.Expose more attributes in the Object Explorer Details window for things like views, stored procedures, linked servers, etc.
I have lot's more I could add.. but alas I think this post response has overstayed it's usefulness.
