Talking to Myself

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.