May 12, 2013

Use SSMS 2012 with SQL server 2008




SQL server Management studio 2012 is freely downloadable from Microsoft site and it is compatible with Sql server 2008.I was using this for past 3 months and found it very useful, so I listed down some useful new features and changes

Even if your company is not ready to upgrade to 2012, this free client upgrade is worth the try

Some useful features

  1. Usability : SSMS 2012 is powered by visual studio so the UI looks lot similar with Visual studio  
  2. I always have issues with 2008 intellisense (autofill) which is very slow and sometimes even manual refresh take longer time to refresh the metadata. But 2012 is very impressive and i am much surprised about the meta data management.
  3. In 2012 intellisense accept part name search.  E.g . If your table name is abc_xyz_ETL then you can type xyz which will pick all the tables which contains the xyz while writing the query
  4. The new improved MDX query editor with MDX intelisense is very useful for SSAS query editing. 
  5. New Source safe integration - the SSMS 2012 can be easily integrated with team foundation server with a free plugin. I am really hoping to see some free plugin for subversion soon. 
  6. Projects are easy to create and maintain
  7. You can create custom template which can be created and used across organisation
  8. New SQL CMD Mode. So you can mix DOS and sql command in the script. Very useful to move and import from excel/csv files via DB links
  9. Very easy to pass the list of servers to the new joiner as you can export the registered servers to other machine

 

For more information please refer to