Obviously, we all have different way of fromatting our own queries. A great feature of SQL Assistant is that you have the luxury of defining the format you want.
If you select the code formatting table of the SQL Assistant options, you can see that you can define your own formatting. For example, if you wish to see the comma (,) of fileds at the beginning (which is my preference), you can change the code format like following.
This feature is not only for SELECT, there are code formats avaiable for all of the frequently used functions in SQL Server 2005. For example, for the CASE statement you can define your own format like the following.
CASE …
WHEN … THEN …
ELSE …
END
The code formatting functions can also be used for the entire script or file to layout the entire text with just single key press or mouse click.
Code Structure
When it comes to analyzing your code, you will need to identify the code structure. As SQL Server Management Studio does not have any other way of identifying the code structure, SQL Assistant offers a helping hand. There is an option called, Code structure in SQL Assistant. If you click that option this is what you will be getting.
On the left of the screen, you can see the structure of your code. By clicking the necessary section you can navigate throughout your code, which is makes analyzing your code very easy. This is especially handy when coding multi-page stored procedures and working with large SQL files which could be tens and or even hundreds of pages long. The code structure would allow you to quickly jump to various parts of code without a need to visually search and scroll through many pages.
Check Spelling
T-SQL code should (ideally) be commented. However there is no way that you can check spelling of the comments. With SQL Assistant, you can do this by simply selecting an option. However you will need to have MS Word on the server which SQL Assistant is installed. In this release, SQL Assistant will crash along with SQL Server Management Studio in case if the function is invoked and MS Word is not installed. I was informed that this will be fixed in a coming release. The spell check function can also be used to check spelling in hard-coded strings such as error messages, notifications and so on…
Enhancements
The ability to expand the wild cards is another important feature which needs to be added to this handy tool. For example, if you write your code like SELECT * FROM ErrorLog, then you should be able to retrieve all the columns of Errorlog tables. After that users can delete unnecessary columns from the query. This would be especially useful when you need to select all the columns except for one or two columns from a table which has numerous columns.
Recommendation
If you consider the current third party tools market, you will see combination of several tools’ features in SQL Assistant,
You can download the trial software from http://www.softtree.com/sqlassist/index.shtml and you can experience by yourself. If you can any issues you can post your questions at http://www.softtree.com/support/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=1
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