I just spent the last couple of hours writing and debugging about 40 lines of TSQL code in SQL Server 2005 Management Studio—it should have taken far less time. What a PITA. Once you’ve worked with Visual Studio for years on end, having to write code in a stone-age editor/debugger is the pits. When you get a syntax error, the line number it gives you might (if you’re really lucky) point in the general vicinity of the problem. The compiler gets really confused at the slightest mistake (missing paren or stray END statement). It also has no intellisense so as you work through the archaic T-SQL code, we make more mistakes than ever because the way CHARINDEX and some other functions accept their arguments just seems backwards—and I’ve been using T-SQL since…well, the dawn of time in SQL Server years. That’s what I get for trying to be multi-lingual.
It will be really nice when T-SQL can be coded and debugged like Visual Basic or C# (well, like Visual Basic who wants anal case-sensitivity?). And where is step-into debugging for ad hoc queries? I guess I could convert the code segments to stored procedures and run them there… but that’s not always possible. And no, this code does not make sense as a CLR function.
So sad it's so true...
My heart lies with SQL Server, but I do mostly Oracle development. I use a tool called "PL/SQL Developer" by a company from the Netherlands (www.allroundautomations.com). This tool makes doing Oracle development far more enjoyable than SQL Server development if you can believe that! Intellisense, formatting, templates you name it. This thing rocks!
If Microsoft could make a tool just half as good as PL/SQL Developer for SQL Server, we'd all better miles ahead...
Y'know what I have always missed with SQL Server? A tool like SQL+ (Oracle).
It's lightweight, (although crappy, if MS wrote such a tool, I'd have a few improvement recommendations), but a must have frankly.
- SM
I don't understand. You can use Profiler to step through, start, run to cursor, pause, stop, and toggle breakpoints for your queries. You can also use SQL Server 2005 in conjuction with Visual Studio 2005 for step into/over/out, breakpoints, call stacks, and variables for stored procedures, functions, triggers, aggregates, and UDFs. What am I missing?
Ah, yes, I'm intimately familar with the Profiler and how VS works. The problem is that in this day and age, the two teams (VS and SQL Server) still haven't created a VB-like (or C#-like) intelligent code editor/debugger for TSQL scripts. It's not just the debugging part which can be done in VS, it's having to go back and forth and back and forth to pick up features in one that's not in the other.