Lately I’ve been working on a SQL2000 project and its afforded me the opportunity to get re-aquainted with the granddaddy of SQL Server query tools – Query Analyzer. For those that don’t know, Query Analyzer (QA) was the query tool provided with SQL Server up until SQL Server 2000; in SQL Server 2005 it was superceded by SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
Having been ensconced in SSMS for about four years now I’d forgotten all about QA but I do recall a few people lamenting its disappearance in SQL Server 2005 hence I was eager to compare it to SSMS and see which i preferred. Well after using QA for over a month now I can categorically state that I prefer SSMS any day of the week and in this blog entry I’ll explain why. Here we go…
The main difference will probably seem ridiculously insignificant to most but to me its made a huge impact and the extent to which its made an impact was only highlighted when I used QA again. In SSMS pressing CTRL-TAB will display the last query window that you used, in QA CTRL-TAB will cycle through the windows in the order in which they were opened.
Like I said, sounds insignificant, right? Well, the change is subtle but the impact is great for a guy like me that prefers to use keyboard shortcuts rather than reach for the mouse. Using QA nowadays does actually wind me up simply because of the lack of CTRL-TAB behaviour that I have become accustomed to in SSMS. |
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Object Explorer in SSMS displays much more information than QA’s Object Browser. Here are the side-by-side screenshots of the two, displaying information for the same table (SSMS’s Object Explorer is on the left).
Some things for you to notice:
- We get a visual indicator of which columns are part of the primary key, part of a foreign key, or neither
- We get more information about indexes – we know whether they are clustered or non-clustered, unique or non-unique
- Keys are listed explicitly rather than being listed as constraints
In addition to better information about tables in SSMS we also get told whether a stored procedure has a default or not; and user defined functions are split out into table-valued functions and scalar functions.
All in all the information presented in SSMS’s Object Explorer is a huge leap forward from QA’s Object Browser. |
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| In SQL Server 2000 much of the information we required had to be gotten through a separate tool – SQL Server Enterprise Manager. In SQL Server 2005 all of that information is presented through SSMS so no longer do we have to move to a different window to get information about linked servers, logins, users, server roles and SQL Server Agent. |
The client statistics feature in SSMS is much improved from the one in QA. Again let’s look at them side-by-side (SSMS first):
SSMS’s is much more aesthetic, we can compare multiple executions side-by-side, and we get visual indicators to tell us exactly what is going on with our queries. I’ve talked more about SSMS’s client statistics feature here. |
Don’t get me wrong, there are some things in QA that I miss. For example F8 doesn’t toggle the Object Explorer anymore and there’s no dependency information in Object Explorer. SSMS is also a lot slower and has a lot of extraneous panes that you really don’t need (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve pressed F4 instead of F5 and have the useless properties pane open on me) – both of these are a hangover from Visual Studio. By and large though these are minor quibbles – SSMS wins for me hands down.
What say you?
-Jamie