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
- Usability : SSMS 2012 is powered by visual studio so the UI looks lot similar with Visual studio
- 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.
- 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
- The new improved MDX query editor with MDX intelisense is very useful for SSAS query editing.
- 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.
- Projects are easy to create and maintain
- You can create custom template which can be created and used across organisation
- 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
- 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
