At the 2024 PASS Data Community Summit, Microsoft announced SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS 21). As of the writing this blog post, it’s still in Public Preview so it’s not something we’d recommend deploying to a production environment, but let’s see where it’s at now.
What’s New in SSMS 21?
1. 64-bit compatibility
This one is huge. SSMS has always been a 32-bit application, which can cause all sorts of issues from general slowness to out of memory exceptions. SSMS 21 is now based on a Visual Studio shell. This means that it’s fully 64-bit compatible and gets some funky new features like different accessibility modes (hello dark mode), as well as all the other improvements you’d expect from a modern 64-bit application.
Doesn’t this look funky?
2. Code and feature search
Along with the interface makeover, we’ve now got code and feature search capabilities. This gives us a native way to find the code we care about as well as searching and enabling the new features baked into SSMS.
Want to know more about Git integration? Hit the search icon and go to feature search.
Type “Git” and you’ll see several settings pages as well as some handy how-to guides for these features.
This is excellent for newer users finding out features as well as us old people who can never remember which menu something is buried in!
3. Copilot/AI
This was the part of the product that Microsoft were most excited about in the PASS Summit keynote. We were shown a number of features, including inbuilt Copilot as well as native support for Vector data types and integration with various AI products.
Unfortunately, I can’t show you these features as they’re not currently included in the public preview, but when it’s available we’ll take a deep dive into it.
4. Query Store Enhancements
The main new feature for me here is the addition of the replica drop down in the query store reports. This allows you to read data from the various replicas you may have in your environment.
This goes hand in hand with the upcoming feature of running a separate Query Store on secondary replicas. Which is going to be great for people who offload read queries onto their secondaries but would like to be able to do funky stuff like forcing plans on the secondary only. Really looking forward to this feature.
4. Improved Performance Dashboard
The performance dashboard has been around for a while, and I suspect it’s not a highly used feature. It gives some basic information about server performance as well as the ability to drill down into it. I would bet that most people are using external tools to monitor their servers, but for situations where this isn’t available, I’d definitely get used to using this.
How to Get Started
As SSMS is in public preview, you can download it from Microsoft directly. Remember that this is still in preview, so go have fun, but beware it can be buggy (I’ve personally had issues with the search being a little flaky). Keep it away from production environments!
Don’t let me stop you though. Go have fun and dig in, learn by doing and see if you can find some fun new features that we haven’t covered here!
