Who's excited about SQL Management Studio 22.7? erm....that would be me!
- Jim Walker
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
It's hard to contain my excitement about a new feature in SQL Management Studio.
I've been working in IT for the last 24 ish years, and the last 15 the tool of my trade has been SQL Management Studio, or as my lovely wife calls it...'the window'. SSMS and I have been best of buddies...it just works. Its powerful, customisable, reliable....its brilliant. The idea of scripting a bit of code. Putting some comments in and a story, saving it to an ever growing library for future use. It was love at first sight.
SSMS and I have spent many happy years togethor, and one of the things we love to do, is fix stuff. A bad report, a flaky interface, a slow running ETL job. This is our Sudoku!
I attended SQL Bits 2026, I go ever year and wrote a little about my 2023 experience...
Back when I worked for a Housing Management System vendor — let’s call them Bivica to keep things anonymous — I always tried to attend the user groups, product enhancement groups, and similar events. I’ve kept that habit going ever since.
But I don’t think I’ve never seen a reaction quite like the multiple rounds of applause at SQLBits when the Microsoft Product Manager introduced the latest SSMS features.
So why am i so excited this time?
SSMS and I have spent many happy years togethor, and one of the things we love to do, is fix stuff. A bad report, a flaky interface, a slow running ETL job. This is our Sudoku!
The first step in any diagnostic exercise is to work out what is happening and what is supposed to happen so we go straight to the procedure and open it up. Only to be presented by this unweildy collection of...in my view junk.
I have my guesses as to why it looked like that, but how on earth are you supposed to quickly see whats going on? You can't.
The SQL Formatter!
I don't know why this one took so long to get introduced. I assume its not so common to dip in and out of so many sites, so many legacy codebases written by so many different people. But its here. We can right click, press Format, and get this beauty:
This is out the box, I've not configured anything, i've not had to setup or pay for anything. No AI, LLM was involved as far as i'm aware. Frankly, I don't care what happened under the bonnet...it just did it.
Customisation
You can even customise if if you so wish. Sadly, if you were born upside down and like your commas at the start, I can't see an option for that, but I did stop looking after about half a second cos its just wrong.
What if I dont have SSMS 22.7
Get it....no excuse. There are so many cool features in recent years, DB Projects, Git Integration, Zoom in and out of the results pane so great if you're presenting. And don't forget...if you do upgrade SSMS you may need to put back the odd setting. This one often catches out some of my clients when their results are suddenly truncating.
You try it
Open a query window in SQL Management Studio 22.7.
Write or paste your SQL query, even if it’s messy or all on one line.
Highlight the query.
Right Click Format SQL.
Watch as the beauty unfolds.
And that’s it really.
It’s not going to get the same marketing fanfare as AI, cloud platforms, or whatever the next big thing is. But for those of us who live in SSMS, who spend our days digging through stored procedures, trying to understand what happened, what should have happened, and why on earth someone wrote it like that in 2014… this is genuinely brilliant.
A formatter won’t fix bad logic. It won’t magically make a terrible procedure performant. It won’t explain why a report has been wrong since last Tuesday. But it will make the first step quicker. It will make the code readable. It will give you half a chance of understanding the story before you start rewriting the ending.
And sometimes, when you’re staring at a thousand lines of SQL written by six different people over ten years, that’s enough to make your day.
So thank you SSMS - for many great years, and many more to come.
Now if you could just sort out the commas-at-the-start people, that would be lovely.
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