Sometimes it's like I'm just talking to myself. I just got a chance to poke around in the Katmai SSMS and I really hope it's not feature complete. I've talked before about crossing the finish line and how it's the little things that count. Well, here are a couple of the little things that are getting overlooked. The job monitor doesn't remember your refresh settings. I would say that most of the time, and by mos Sometimes it’s like I’m just talking to myself. I just got a chance to poke around in the Katmai SSMS and I really hope it’s not feature complete. I’ve talked before about crossing the finish line and how it’s the little things that count. Well, here are a couple of the little things that are getting overlooked.The job monitor doesn’t remember your refresh settings. I would say that most of the time, and by most I mean well over 95%… but most of the time when I’m in the job monitor it’s to monitor jobs. And to have to reset my refresh settings every time is pointless. Why can’t the GUI remember my refresh setting? That actually seems more intuitive than making someone reset it every time. Here’s an idea… create a small file on the HD somewhere that holds settings like that, and read it when the time is right. It doesn’t have to be fancy. But you could store all these things in there… refresh settings, filter settings, etc. Think about it for me will you?Then next thing oddly enough has to do with jobs too. When you bring up the list of jobs, it still doesn’t show you which ones failed. It’s really sad that this was really easy to do in SQL2K, but since Yukon, we have to go through another step to get this info. Even worse, if we open up the job monitor to see failed jobs, again, we have to reset that filter every time. So it’s really more than one step to see the list of failed jobs. We can see the disabled jobs in the list, so why not the failed jobs? You know, like I said above… it’s the little things that really count. Like being able to save filters in the SP menu, or in the job monitor. These are things that would be really helpful. It just goes to show once again that MS really doesn’t give DBAs much consideration. Everything is always about developers. Sure, they have the new intellisense, but all those new language features are all centered around development tasks and not DBA tasks. Not a single DBCC, Backup, Login, etc command made it into the intellisense. Nothing for DBAs. Now, this really only counts for GUI features because there are some engine features for DBAs. The DMF and new auditing features come to mind. But when it comes to actually making a DBAs daily life easier and making their day to day tasks quicker and more efficient, all you hear are crickets.I’ve personally been asking for some very specific features for a long time now and I haven’t seen one of them show up. I’ve even talked to the tools guys in Redmond and they all shook their heads and agreed with me and said y, wow, that would be great… but it still hasn’t happened. Among these are: 1. sharable snippets with nicknames. You can setup a code snippet that defines a block of code for say getting your top query offenders. Then to activate it you just type something like “topqueries” and it replaces that with the snippet you defined. For those of you who remember the old SQL IDE from Imceda you know exactly what I’m talking about. But this feature would have huge benefits for DBAs who need to troubleshoot things on the fly and don’t have time to check code out of VSS or TFS.2. Server groups with different backgrounds defined. So you could define all of your prod boxes in the GUI and assign anything marked as prod a background of say light pink or yellow… whatever… that way, you get to visually see when you’re working on prod and it’s harder to make a mistake because you thought you were in dev. It’s these visual queues that make things easier. 3. Undockable windows. A lot of us have dual monitors these days and when we’re working on a prod issue it’s really helpful to be able to see 2 panes at once. Say we’re query tuning and we want to undock the execution plan window so we don’t have to keep switching back to it. Or we’re trying different things in a deadlock or blocking scenario and we want to see the sp_who window (or these days, sys.sysprocesses) to see when it clears up. Having undockable windows is nothing but helpful.4. Along with the one above how about auto-refresh query windows. We should be able to define that a query in a window refreshes at an interval. The sp_who scenario is perfect. I shouldn’t have to switch to a new window and run the query again just to see if the block has cleared up. I’d like to be able to type my command in a window, undock it, and have the window run that command say every 1sec or every 5secs so I can just see what it’s doing. Why do I have to keep doing it by hand? See, these are all DBA functions that we have to deal with every day. But what GUI functions do we get? None. It actually takes us more work today to get a list of failed jobs than it did back in 2000. It’s actually harder for us (in Yukon anyway, I’ll check on Katmai soon) to troubleshoot SSIS packages because we not only have to export the packages and open them up in VS, but if we want to do anything with them, they have to actually be part of a project. What the hell kinda crap is that? Do you have any idea how many miscellaneous projects I have on my workstation because I had to troubleshoot a single SSIS package once? I finally created a troubleshooting shell project and I just trade the packages out, but it’s ridiculous to have to do something like that for a simple production problem. You can chalk this up to a form of sticker shock. Every time a new build comes out I always hope that some things have been made easier for DBAs in the GUI. And I’m always disappointed. The problem is that you’ve got developers writing code for DBAs. These guys don’t know what it is to work in a real prod shop with 100 things to do at once.Anyway, I’m going to keep looking for DBA enhancements in the GUI and I’ll report if I find anything that’s actually easier than it was 10yrs ago. But there’s still no way to easily see and change server-side traces, and we’ve been commenting on that one for years.You guys shoot me things if you’ve discovered something I haven’t. But I’m using the Katmai GUI for my prod work now so if there’s anything in there, I’ll find it. I am glad that I’m finally able to use it though. This is the first CTP of the cycle that allows us to import our existing server list from Yukon. Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at: https://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com Read my book reviews at: www.ITBookworm.com Blog Author of: DBA Rant – https://dbarant.blogspot.com Databases