Dan's Blog : Management Studio

PBM – it’s like liquid awesome!

dtjones — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:20:10 GMT

Brent Ozar and Thomas LaRock do a 3 part video series on the power of Policy-based Management (PBM). Interestingly SCOM comes up several times in the discussion.

They cover the basics of PBM and Thomas goes into more depth on how he’s using it in his environment. The series is about 35 minutes in total.

Regardless of your PBM experience level I highly recommend watching these videos.

http://thomaslarock.com/2009/08/policy-based-management-podcast-part-1/

http://thomaslarock.com/2009/08/policy-based-management-podcast-part-2/

http://thomaslarock.com/2009/08/policy-based-management-podcast-part-3/

SQL Server 2008 R2 August CTP: Utility Bug

dtjones — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:53:06 GMT

The August CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 contains a bug in Management Studio when connected to a Control Point. You can find the details here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlkjappmsmgmt/thread/03506a9b-e9b1-4d77-a3e1-28627e8f4867

Refreshing the IntelliSense Cache

dtjones — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:17:17 GMT

There are cases where the local cache used by IntelliSense becomes stale. Refreshing the cache is easy but not necessarily obvious. There are two ways to refresh the cache: 1) Go to Edit -> IntelliSense -> Refresh Local Cache and 2) Hit Ctrl+Shift+R

Where The Heck is Activity Monitor?

dtjones — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:50:02 GMT

You're sitting at your desk rocking out to great music, you've just installed Management Studio 2008, you expand the Management node and start to click on Activity Monitor... Wait a second, What the %&*$#@, where's Activity Monitor? Did those goofs over at MSFT kill off a perfectly good tool?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, we did kill off Activity Monitor. No, it's not totally gone. Well, the old one is totally gone. But the totally new one is there but we moved the launch point. It's now launched from the toolbar and the context menu off of the server. See the screen shots below:

Once you find the launch point and launch Activity Monitor you'll notice it's been redesigned. I'll let you explore it on your own. Oh, I can't help it... I'll let you in on two cool things. Right-click in the graph area and you can set the refresh interval, pause it, and force a refresh. The second cool thing, expand the Recent Expensive Queries area and right-click on a query. You can view the actual query text (it'll open it in a new query window) and you can also view the execution plan. Now how cool is that?

Launching Vanilla PowerShell from SSMS

dtjones — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:22:28 GMT

One of the criticisms of our PowerShell implementation is the integration with Management Studio launches our custom minishell. With just a few simple key strokes you can add a custom tool menu item and toolbar button. To do this select "External Tools..." from the "Tools" menu in Management Studio.

The following dialog is displayed.

The above picture shows the dialog filled in to launch the vanilla PowerShell shell. You could add custom arguments, such as -nologo, if you desire and you can set the default directory. You could also use this to run a specific script. The title you enter will show up in the "Tools".

Once you've registered the custom tool you can add it to any toolbar. Here I'll add it to the default toolbar. Just select "Customize..." from the "Tools" menu.

The Customize dialog will be displayed. Unfortunately Visual Studio doesn't replace the generic "External Command 1". In this example I only have one external tool defined so I'll grab "External Command 1" and drag it to the toolbar.

This adds a button to the toolbar to launch the custom tool. Thankfully Visual Studio replaces the generic name with the name entered into the Title field.

The first-class integration on the Object Explorer context menu will launch you into SQLPS.exe directly to the selected object. This integration won't do the same but if you need to shell out into vanilla PowerShell this is a quick way to do so from within SSMS. If you combine this with the registration of the SQL Server provider extensions in a vanilla PS environment you might just get close to the best of both worlds.

Manageability Presentation from the SQL2K8 Launch

dtjones — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:14:51 GMT

Several people have asked me for the presentation Praveen and I used for the Manageability session @ the SQL2K8 Launch event last month in LA. A version of the presentation is available on the DVD that all launch attendees received. However, the version we used in the session was slightly different. In any event, you can download the presentation here. This is a link to my Windows Live SkyDrive. I apologize for it not being an official Microsoft site. I have tagged the presentation as Final (using the new feature in PowerPoint 2007) and I also signed it. Enjoy!

IntelliSense & Debugger Support

dtjones — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:51:43 GMT

A question came up at the launch event: will T-SQL Intellisense and the T-SQL Debugger support SQL2K5 and/or SQL2K. The situation involves connecting to these server versions from Management Studio 2008. The answer is no, in order to enjoy IntelliSense and the Debugger you have to be connected to a SQL Server 2008 Server.