Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Query Analyzer, How Do I Hate Thee?

Microsoft's Query Analyzer is the tool MS provides as the main SQL Server development environment. Are they kidding? Besides the fact that it is broken, it lacks one of the best features ever made for IDEs: intellisense. How the hell is this not included? It could also have background compilation like VB.NET (checking for errors automatically). Adding these things are obvious wins.

What I'd really like to see is some sort of auto-formatting preferences. Everyone prefers their SQL formatted a little differently. I like capital keywords and short lines. Some like less indenting, lowercase keywords. Line breaks, spacing, capitalization of keywords, all these things have no impact on the actual parsing and execution of SQL code. The ideal SQL IDE would be able to store individual preferences for these things and apply them for each user. That way, I wouldn't spend 10 minutes reformatting SQL my coworker wrote or just struggle through it. This isn't really that hard; why they haven't done it is beyond me.

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