New toys
Had a bit of a brain fart moment recently. In all the excitement of installing the latest and greatest version of SSMS I was eager to use it as my daily driver. Especially since Azure Data Studio will no longer be supported. I had installed the latest version of SSMS. As I was in the middle of purge of all my machines, data and software. I uninstalled prior versions of SSMS too.
What started out as a minor annoyance then became a blocker for me. IntelliSense “stopped” working. I was quick to judge the tool as a buggy and rushed version released without proper testing. Since IntelliSense is used widely, I figured if it was a bug there will be a fix out pretty soon. Weeks later no fix and I figured this is something only I am facing.
How hard can it be to enable IntelliSense
IntelliSense isn’t a complicated affair. There are hardly 2 settings that need to be checked (which I did multiple times). For the curious here are the settings
Step 1 – Enable IntelliSense
Under the SSMS Toolbar click Tools > Options > Text Editor> Transact SQL> IntelliSense
Step 2 – Enable Auto list member and Parameter Information
Under the SSMS Toolbar click Tools > Options > Text Editor> Transact SQL> General
Wait there is another Step too!!
Make sure SSMS isn’t configured to start new queries in SQLCMD mode. Naturally this step isn’t related to IntelliSense but you can see how it will interfere with the way IntelliSense works.
Under the SSMS Toolbar click Tools > Options > Query Execution>General>
uncheck the box “by default , open new queries in SQLCMD mode”
Summary
SSMS is a great tool, part of me always knew Azure Data Studio would be useless for the hard core DBA and those predictions came true. We are now left with one awesome but cripplingly singular way of connecting to database engine. I shudder to think of the day when a bug in SSMS prevents DBAs from being able to connect to their environments. Meanwhile I will happily type away in my new fully functional IDE, as I experiment in SQL 2025.
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