>> I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.

SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.

SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.

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> SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.

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True, those are fair points. It does depend on one's use case. Instant search/filter/sort through query results is a useful one that seems to be an omission on SSMS's part.

Quick aggregation and charting are nice to haves, but I would typically do these in Jupyter or Tableau (or Excel if it's a small dataset). These are not features most people would miss if they weren't in their SQL client. Pre-query variable substitution is a great idea, though in SSMS one can use DECLARE @var in many instances (not all) -- it's also not widely supported in 3rd party clients except for more advanced ones like DataGrip.

SSMS does have a pretty comprehensive GUI for creates/edits of schemas. Bulk data ingest can be done in multiple ways (CSV import GUI, bacpacs/dacpacs, backup/restores or using the bcp CLI that comes with SSMS) -- also bulk ingest is not a common feature in 3rd party GUIs.

Side note: for really large data ingests from Parquet etc. I write my own ETL in C# which uses the SqlBulkCopy class (or "turbodbc" in Python) for fast ETL. No GUI client I know can do this.

Kind of strange how you write about the GUI features in SSMS being awesome, but then you go to great lengths to demonstrate that GUI features in other clients are redundant.

Well, the original question I was trying to explore the question was one of what power one gives up with a generic GUI SQL client. My take is one does give up a number of database-specific features and I attempted to discuss them.

Your response lists what other clients do better than SSMS, which to me is a different question, so my reply was more in response to this question. I agree that those clients have features that SSMS does not or is weak at. I also think a handful of those features are nice to have but not really something I would expect from a SQL client so I'm neutral about them. That's all.

I believe the two questions lead to separate discussions (both of which I'm happy to engage in), and are non mutually exclusive. Other clients can have all these other nice features which SSMS doesn't, but that does not imply that that there's not still a tradeoff when it comes to their lack of native support for a database's deep features.

How do you deal with the complete lack of searching for tables/SPs/functions in SSMS? There are a number of 3rd party extensions but they all seem slow and still just jump you to the entity in the explorer.

The speed of searching for anything in DataGrip is just so beautiful and amazing for productivity. A big downside is we have run into situations where a SP is cached and is an old version and DataGrip doesn’t notify me that’s the case.

> How do you deal with the complete lack of searching for tables/SPs/functions in SSMS?

That is a weakness of SSMS, and I've no good answers.

For stuff like SQL formatting though, the free ApexSQL Refactor [1] has been a godsend for me. I write a lot of complex analytic queries and having the ability to tidy up statements as I'm writing the query is amazing.

[1] https://www.apexsql.com/sql-tools-refactor.aspx

GUI search is awful, but it does exist. Right clicking on an object type node (e.g. 'Tables' or 'Procedures' in the object explorer) and selecting the 'Filter' option gives you a limited search feature for objects in that node.

It is clumsy and painful, and I will most often just query the sys schema to search for objects, but GUI search is there.

Edit: read the parent wrong, but leaving my comment here so it doesn’t look like backtracking some offensive content.

> wonder if one is giving up a lot of power.

That’s an irrational concern. GUI tools also come with SQL consoles where you can do anything that’s possible in the CLI. With the added benefit of results being presented in a nicer way.

If you've used SSMS extensively you'll know it's tailored to SQL server like a glove. You'd definitely be leaving usability on the table going with a generic DB client. The person you've responded to even mentioned that of course you can do all things via CLI, but SSMS builds powerful GUI layer on top of that

> That’s an irrational concern.

Is it though?

So for SQL Server, you can't really see the live query plan (real-time plan + statistics while the query is running) without the GUI. You cannot see the Activity Monitor without the GUI. There are elements that cannot be accessed via pure SQL. 3rd party GUIs generally don't support these features.

Never mind, I read your comment wrong.

No worries, I appreciate it.

I think you’ve missed wenc’s point - they aren’t arguing for a CLI, they’re arguing for a UI specialized to a single RDBMS, vs one trying to convert many RDBMSs.