Biggest secret feature of Management Studio

 

The biggest feature of management studio that most people don't know about is the keyboard shortcuts for stored procedures.

You can configure a shortcut i.e. CTRL+1 to execute a stored procedure. Whats more if you have some text highlighted it can be passed to that SP as a parameter.

To configure go to Tools | Options | Keyboard.

You will see a set of shortcuts defined by default i.e. ALT + F1 for sp_help.

I set CTRL + F1 to sp_spaceused and CTRL + 3 to sp_helptext.

Whilst these are great they can be better. For instance if you have execution plans selected and you run sp_help you will have a huge number of execution plans generated. This causes a huge problem.

I've created a connect item to get the keyboard shortcut functionality extended and to allow selected text to be passed as a string. (Currently if you select Sales.Order and do ALT+F1 it will fail because of the . (period) in the selected text)

The connect item is here https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=390612

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Published 03 January 2009 22:57 by simonsabin

Comments

08 January 2009 12:41 by zzzbla

# re: Biggest secret feature of Management Studio

You got my vote... ;-)

BTW, probably the most useful keyboard I only learnt about this week is CTRL-(SHIFT)-F6, which lets you loop through query windows in the same way CTRL-(SHIFT)-TAB did in Query Analyzer, and unlike CTRL-TAB in SSMS.

12 January 2009 12:07 by Christian

# re: Biggest secret feature of Management Studio

Yes, I love this too! I configure Ctrl-F3 for 'select * from sys.dm_waiting_tasks' and Ctrl-F4 for 'select * from sys.dm_os_wait_stats ORDER BY by wait_time_ms DESC'.