Software Spotlight
Product:
SQL Prompt
Version:
2
Publisher:
Price:
FREE until September 1, 2006
If you are a visual developer, you may be used to seeing a list of keywords for variables whenever you type “.” or press Ctrl + Spacebar in your integrated development environment. I don’t think you need me to tell you that this is an extremely useful feature.
What if you could get the same functionality for your favorite SQL Server editor? Just imagine how much time you could save it you didn’t have to spend it hunting down table column names and their properties, like data type and length.
SQL Prompt enables this functionality in Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager, and UltraEdit32. It simply sits behind the scenes and provides unobtrusive Intellisense style auto-completion for Microsoft SQL Server editors when you press Ctrl + Spacebar or when you type “.” after a table/view/alias name.
Figure 1: SQL Prompt is easy to configure and use.
Features include:
- Table/view name completion.
- Column name completion.
- Stored procedure name completion.
- USE completion.
- JOIN/JOIN ON completion.
- Auto uppercasing of keywords.
- Auto popup after keywords.
Installation and Configuration
You won’t be hassled by a lot of fancy screens with this tool. The only UI is the configuration screen (Figure 1).
Figure 2: Select items that you want to show in the candidate list.
When you select items that you want to show in the candidate list, an important feature is the ability to display system objects (Figure 2). Most of the time, you will not need to display system objects. But you can decide this on your own. Another important option is the display of functions types. As there are many functions in SQL Server, you may find it to be more of a problem than a solution if the list shows all of the functions available in SQL Server. To avoid this you have the option of selecting only those functions you wish to see.