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I've spent a chunk of the weekend playing with the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) edition of the forthcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and I am more than impressed. And I am not even talking about features, functionality, or the installation and configuration experience (which was, by the way, superb). What I am most enjoying is the new SQL Server Management Studio (it replaces the old Enterprise Manager, Query Tool, and more), and is clean, intuitive, and astoundingly powerful. From the uncluttered interface to the logical groupings of features and functions (columns, keys, constraints, triggers, indexes, etc.) to the choices in how to present data to the automatic relationship diagram generation to the various wizards (database engine tuning, for example) to the instant access to execution plans and activity statistics to the automatic generation of stored procedure and trigger shells to ... you get the idea. Everything I have tried to do thus far has simply required a button or right click just where you'd expect it to be. If you use SQL Server now (6.x, or 7 or 2000), I'd strongly suggest that you download the CTP so as to try it out yourself.

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impressive i must say. I have always been a fan of MySQL because i always felt that the Enterprise Manager was far too inefficient to use...and overall the experience of using it wasn't that amazing...then again, how often is that really a concern :P Its good news though for sure! I am far more impressed with this release of SQL than anything else i've seen on the market in a while...although mysql is still free :P

# Posted By Derek P | 10/23/05 10:42 PM

Ben, I have one question. I use Ent Mgr daily, and in general have no problems with it, but I despise how badly it handles any remote SQL Server. As an example, you right click on a remote server so yo ucan edit the connection properties, and you have to wait while the tool sends out a net request. If you move your mouse then the right hand menu may show up and then just go away. In general - it is like the built the tool w/o thinking of servers that may be slow to access. Has that improved?

# Posted By Raymond Camden | 10/23/05 11:10 PM

Ray, good question, I have yet to try that. I guess we could test it together.

# Posted By Ben Forta | 10/24/05 7:31 AM

Hmm, I wonder if I could install _just_ the front end tool and leave my back end alone. If so, it is worth playing with.

# Posted By Raymond Camden | 10/24/05 9:01 AM

Here's a silly question: have you had a chance to play around with the CLR hosting at all?

Ray: I use Enterprise Manager on a daily basis for both local and remote servers, and have practically 0 issues (often going through remote desktop to access EntMgr with another hop to the actual SQL Server)...

# Posted By Jason Nussbaum | 10/24/05 9:07 AM

Did you also know that you can manage SQL 2000 instances from the new SQL 2005 Management Studio? I've used it exclusively since Beta 2 for my local SQL 2000 instance (except for modifying DTS packages.)

Regarding the hosted CLR, I've had a lot of fun writing sprocs in C# ;) I've also been quite keen of the native XML data type.

Cheers!

# Posted By Scott Van Vliet | 10/24/05 9:42 AM

Interesting about the UI:
I've been using my .NET Studio to work on SQL2000 since the Enterprise Manager was so clunky. I'll load up the CTP for SQL2005 and give that a test drive.. Thanks for the note

# Posted By Mark Starr | 10/24/05 11:50 AM

I agree Ray... it is very important to me to be able to install the manager for development machines... without the full install.

# Posted By John Farrar | 10/24/05 11:53 AM

SQL2K5 has some pretty awesome features; but I've been hearing amongst the DBA land of folk that performance wise it has issues. Has anyone heard about this?

# Posted By Tariq Ahmed | 10/24/05 1:02 PM

Does anyone had problems with installing the new Management Studio ?? I cannot seems to figure it why the Studio is missing with my install. I tried to do the re-installation but didnt help.. Anybody else is having a similar problem.
I also tried connecting the new SQL 2005 server with the entreprise edition but it doesn't allow me to connect....Can someone help me out here ???

# Posted By Mujeebur Rahmansaher | 10/26/05 8:16 PM

OK... who put all those anoying links in there.

Anyhow... has anyone learned how to transfer (import/export) data objects from one location to another using the SQL Server 2005 Express Manager. The lack of a help file is the only thing I have found that I don't like about it so far. What an amazing leap foward in data management. As outdated as SQL Enterprise Manager was before this is state of the art... (even if it is MS)... LOL. I figure it won't be long till we see a soup'd up mySQL Admin tool to match. (Since that tool was better this is another example of how competition benefits the consumer. This just shows you how much we CFers are helping the .Net guys. Noted in a survey one the download site that MS listed several server languages... including PHP... but no place to find ColdFusion. Looks like inside out marketing to me. Perhaps they didn't know it was a web programming language, you suppose?)

# Posted By John Farrar | 11/30/05 9:23 PM

Ben,

Hopefully you'll get this comment. You must have sort of contacts at Microsoft, if so could you please plead with them to fix Management Studio. I've outlined some of the bigger issues that me and a bunch of DBAs have been having trouble with but Microsoft keeps blowing us off. Below is the link to the blog post about the issues:

http://rip747.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/sql-server-...
http://rip747.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/sql-server-...

This is just terrible that Microsoft won't address these basic features that were so easy to use in Enterprise Manager. Thanks for your help.

# Posted By tony petruzzi | 10/10/07 7:19 PM

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SQL Server 2005 Impresses