Thursday, December 31, 2015

Query Shortcuts in Management Studio

The most friendly database tool, Management Studio was released with SQL Server 2005 and it has become the right-hand for both database administrators and developers. SQL Server Management Studio is an integrated environment for doing all types of operations and management related to SQL Server and it is a rich tool equipped with many functionalities and an editor. Although we have been using it for long time, Query Shortcuts are still unknown to many. Here is a post on it, and you will surely find the usefulness of them.

Query Shortcuts allows you to configure key combinations for executing your common commands. By default, three shortcuts are already configured and can be used immediately. Seeing configured shortcuts and new shortcut configuration can be done with Options interface which can be opened with Tools menu.


As you see, three shortcuts are already configured. If you press Ctrl+1 in Query Editor, sp_who procedure will be automatically executed and you will see the result of it.

In addition to that, we can configure our own short cuts. Here are some example;



"SELECT * FROM " is configured with Ctrl+5 and "EXEC" is configured with Ctrl+6. This allows us to highlight either a table name or stored procedure and get it either queried or executed using assigned shortcut. For example, if Person.Person is selected and Ctrl+5 is pressed, the statement SELECT * FROM Person.Person will executed.


Make sure you do not assign shortcuts for all operations. Operations like delete should not be configured because you can accidentally delete records once configured.

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