Visual Studio has spoiled me. I love the Intellisense feature that has continued to evolve with each new edition of Microsoft's IDE. Intellisense not only reduces the time it takes me to develop solutions, but it's kind of like a built-in checker with respect to referencing objects and variables. Put those two things together and it's little surprise that Intellisense is well-liked by many, many developers.

Query Analyzer (QA) and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) don't have Intellisense. I was hoping SSMS would have it built-in, but unfortunately it does not. And for 90% of the work I do in SQL Server, I'm using one of these two applications. I have other tools which have Intellisense and I like them a lot. But unfortunately, I'm more inclined to type isqlw at a command prompt or through Start | Run and old habits die hard. It's like taking the same route to work each morning. Sooner or later you'll drive it and not realize you did. You'll be at work and stop and think, "Hey, how did I get here?" And you know you drove but you don't actually remember the details of the drive. Your brain is so trained to follow a particular route that you're not consciously making the decisions of where to turn, etc. For me, isqlw is the same way. It brings up Query Analyzer and I can get into the environment immediately. But that means I don't get the advantage of Intellisense.

PromptSQL fixes that. It'll provide Intellisense to QA and SSMS both. Here's an example of the Intellisense working to reveal a table name. It also shows the table definition.

It'll also reveal columns if the table is easily determined as shown by this screenshot (note the type is indicated, too).

The PromptSQL "client" deploys in the Startup folder and when I log in it starts and remains active. It'll detect when I'm using QA or SSMS and provides Intellisense. It's also adjustable. If I want a delay before my Intellisense can pop up, I can set that. I can also tell it to pop up immediately. I've adjusted the settings some to suit me and it's one of those tools I've shown the other DBAs. I've been heavy into SQL Server the last week or so doing some research and I can't tell you how many times I've hit CTRL-SPACE or hit the period and then used the Intellisense features. It's sped up some of the things I've been doing and I'm always looking to save time with so many things on my plate.

There is a 30-day demo license if you want to give it a try for yourself. Here's the web site for PromptSQL: http://www.promptsql.com/