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>> I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client. SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party

>> I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client. SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc. SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.

wenc 7y ago
--- > SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc. --- True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part. Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip. SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs. Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Kind of strange how you write about the GUI features in SSMS being awesome, but then you go to great lengths to demonstrate that GUI features in other clients are redundant.
  - wenc 7y ago
    Well, the original question I was trying to explore the question was one of what power one gives up with a generic GUI SQL client. My take is one does give up a number of database-specific features and I attempted to discuss them. Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all. I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.

wenc 7y ago

--- > SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc. --- True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part. Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip. SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs. Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.

listenallyall 7y ago
Kind of strange how you write about the GUI features in SSMS being awesome, but then you go to great lengths to demonstrate that GUI features in other clients are redundant.
- wenc 7y ago
  Well, the original question I was trying to explore the question was one of what power one gives up with a generic GUI SQL client. My take is one does give up a number of database-specific features and I attempted to discuss them. Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all. I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.