Chapter 3. SQL Server Tools

We as developers are accustomed to using integrated development environments (IDEs) in our software projects. Visual Studio has been a major player in the IDE space for many years, if not decades, and has allowed developers to use the latest software development processes to further improve quality and efficiency in software projects. Server management on the other hand, has generally been a second-class citizen for many products in the past. In general, this focus can be understood, if not agreed with. IDEs are tools that design and create software which can generate revenue for a business, whereas management tools generally only offer the benefit of some sort of cost savings, rather than direct revenue generation.

The SQL Server Tools of the past (pre-SQL 2005) were very much focused on fulfilling the requirements of being able to manage and query SQL Server instances and databases, but received no great investments in making the tools "comfortable", or even enjoyable to use. Advanced IDEs were firmly in the application development domain and application developers knew that databases were a storage system at best and therefore required no elegant tooling to work with them.

Luckily for us, the advent of SQL Server 2005, along with the release of the .NET Framework encouraged some people at Microsoft to invest a little more time and resources into providing an improved interface for both developers and DBAs for database and data management purposes. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) was born and unified the functionality of two legacy tools: Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager. Anyone who has worked with SQL Server since the 2005 release will recognize the application regardless of whether they are using the 2005 release, or the latest 2016 build.

There have been several different names and releases of the second tool in this chapter: SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), going back to SQL Server 2005/2008, when the tool was known as Visual Studio Database Projects (also known as Data Dude). The many incarnations of this tool since SQL Server 2005 have been focused on the development of database projects. SSDT has many of the tools and interfaces known to Visual Studio users and allows a seasoned Visual Studio user to quickly familiarize themselves with the tool. Particularly interesting is the improved ability to integrate database and business intelligence projects into source control, continuous integration and automated deployment processes.

In this chapter, we will be exploring:

• Changes in the release management of SQL Server tools (SSMS and SSDT)
• New SSMS features and enhancements
• Using live query statistics
• New developer tools for the R language