When I moved from Oracle 7 to SQL Server 6.5 I was
amazed at the tools you got with SQL Server. They made the product so much
easier to manage and pickup. Things like enterprise manager, profiler and query
plans where amazing.
That was almost 10 years ago, and whats changed. Well very little.
So the tools now support the new engine features, and they look different but
in essence there is much that has improved since the 6.5 days.
There's no schema designer, there are no nice visualisers of database
performance, no can't drag a table from one database to another, or change the
data type of a column and have it propogate through the schema.
Ok so these aren't simple things to solve, but thats not my problem, I want
tools that make my life easier. Management studio is just a cataloging system.
It doesn't really help me do my job.
I think Data Dude has gone some way, the error checking (compile like)
feature is great as is the way things are structured.
Whats more many will say that there are lots of little bugs/features that are
sitting in management studio that just aren't getting fixed.
So what can be done. Well ove the past months I've seen a huge drive my the
manageability team to improve the lot of Management Studio. However what I find
is that its all tied to the major release of Katmai and so you have to wait for
3 years before you get something. In fact its going to be more like 5 years,
i.e. you have the idea now, it won't get into Katmai so will be in katmai +1
which will be in 4-5 years time.
4-5 years time, my kids will be in school by then, I will have probably
changed jobs, probably now working on something different and won't care.
What I want is to be able to benefit from the drive of the tools guys and see
the benefits realised sooner. This is only going to happen if the tools are not
tied to the release of the engine. One argument is to include new features in
service packs. Well anyone that manages many servers doesn't want new features
they have to test they just want the minimal changes for bugs.
So if you support my idea of splitting out the release of tools from the
release of the engine please vote.
https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=331608