SQL 11 (“Denali”) has been around us for quite some time now and is almost ready for making a dash towards the “Release Candidate” (RC) state with Community Technology Preview (CTP) 03 being released last month. That being said, this post might seem a little late, but I tend to unconsciously study the new productivity features of SSMS that we, as the developer community tend to use more.

One such productivity feature that I welcome about the SQL 11 (“Denali”) is the fact that Intellisense in SSMS now uses a “like” search. To demonstrate my point, let’s try to search for the AdventureWorks database (While I am demonstrating this with database names, you would notice that it is true for all database objects).

SQL Server 2008 SP2	SQL 11 (“Denali”) CTP 03

Here’s how this feature is useful.

If we want to look for all sales orders related information, we can be pretty sure that the information would be in the Sales schema. We can search for the word “orders” and get all the objects that have the word “orders” in their name, giving us the opportunity to scan through a filtered list, thus increasing our chances of remembering the correct object name.

I am bad at remembering names and therefore, this is a productivity enhancement for me. As time goes along, I will keep sharing other such enhancements that I use with SQL 11 (“Denali”), CTP03.

Until we meet next time,

Be courteous. Drive responsibly.