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

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.