So I’ve just started using SQL Server 2005. When I sat down at the SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, the first thing I thought was “Wow, this thing is great! Finally, everything is in one application!” But the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve grown to hate it.
And not because of anything fundamentally wrong with it – it really is a great tool. But it just feels as though it was really rushed out the door and so it’s got very little “polish.”
The most obvious thing is that almost all queries are done in the UI thread, which means the UI seems to be very unresponsive at times. And there’s never a way to cancel a long-running query. For example, if I select all the stored procedures in my application, and select “Script As → CREATE statement” then there’s no way to cancel that command – which takes forever (much longer than in SQL 2000, and I don’t really know why…)
But the thing that really annoys me are the keyboard shortcuts. Specifically, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a way to change them. There’s an option to switch between a “SQL Server 2000” scheme and a “Standard” scheme, and you can change the shortcuts for CTRL+1 – CTRL+0 (by assigning them to stored procedures to execute), but that’s it!!
Now, it wouldn’t be such a huge deal, after all, I could probably get used to the new keyboard mappings (why do Microsoft like to change keyboard mappings with every release of a product?) but there’s one shortcut which really pisses me off. And this if you right-click a table and select “Open”, you can enter a new row at the bottom of the window. It’s great for just quickly adding stuff to a table. But if you’re typing something, and you accidentally press SHIFT+SPACE instead of just SPACE, then bam! you’re out of the editbox for that column and it selects the whole row.
Here’s a quick demo. Say I’m trying to “SOME TEXT” into a column, I get up to the first “E” and here’s what I got so far:
Then, since I’m typing all capitals anyway, I “forget” that I can’t type SHIFT+SPACE, so when I do, I get this:
Which means I have to let go of SHIFT, type a SPACE, then press SHIFT again. It’s really jarring to my typing “flow”
I hate it!!
Oh yeah, and to make matters worse, it doesn’t even mention this “shortcut” (that is, the shortcut to frustration) in the help file. So I don’t know where it comes from.