Thoughts on dbForge over SSMS

[u/individjournalist]

Been on SSMS since about 2012. Started using dbForge Studio properly a year ago and I have opinions, curious where other people have landed.

To be clear, SSMS got better. 22 being 64-bit on the VS shell killed the out of memory nonsense on large result sets, dark theme finally exists, Copilot is in there if you want it. It is free, it is what everyone has, and if you administer servers it is still the thing. I am not arguing anyone should uninstall it.

Where dbForge wins for me is everything around writing the query rather than the query itself.

Comparison, mainly. Schema and data compare are built in and they generate sync scripts you can read before you run them. In SSMS world you are either buying Redgate, working with SqlPackage and DACPACs, or doing it by hand. Redgate is excellent and also costs considerably more. This is the actual reason I switched.

The editor is the other one. Native IntelliSense is still weak, it gets confused by aliases and CTEs and gives up on bigger schemas. dbForge completion is better and the formatting is properly configurable, which matters if a team wants to share one profile. Worth saying you can get exactly that inside SSMS with dbForge SQL Complete as an add-in, same engine, so if you like SSMS and only want the editor fixed, that is the cheaper path. Took them a few months to support SSMS 22 but it is there now.

Little things that matter. Test data generation that gives values that a human would expect. Documentation that you can actually generate instead of promising to write. Unit testing on tSQLt without having to set up the framework yourself. Source control integration that doesn’t hurt.

The downsides... It is a paid product, licensed per engine, and Edge if you want all of them. SSMS will always be more current for brand new SQL Server features because Microsoft ships it. Some of the DBA surface is thinner, I still keep SSMS for Agent jobs, Always On and anything security related. The UI is dense, a lot of toolbars, it is not a minimal app. And if your shop is standardized on SSMS you will be the one person handing off scripts with your own formatting on them.

Where I have landed is both. dbForge for development, SSMS for administration. Less clean than I would like, works fine.

What I want to know is whether anyone has gone fully off SSMS, or if everyone is running the same split I am.

[u/alinroc]

Why does this feel like an advertisement?

[u/Northbank75 → u/alinroc]

I thought it was ... is....

[u/kassett43]

You need the Enterprise version to get Git support? Wow.

[u/TrollingForFunsies]

My thoughts are why does this tool have a subscription based payment model?

[u/HeFromFlorida]

I have db forge and sql prompt (two different companies). I prefer dbForge solely for the column profiling you get in the result set whereas you’d have to export to excel for certain aggregations

[u/SpaceMarine663]

I find db_forge search queries causing blocks all the time in my environment. It's partly the users fault; they leave absolutely everything ticked on all DBS even when they're just searching for a stored proc or something.

I prefer Redgate SQL search over db_forge, however since I got a new laptop, I can't install SQL search since the old version cannot be removed. What I like is that Redgate SQL search can search server agent jobs, whereas db_forge cannot

[u/Ar4iii]

If there is one single thing that always irritates me in SSMS is there is no easy and quick way to just open a stored procedure or function to see the code. Basically you know the name and you have too look it up in the tree... this is such a basic missing feature.

[u/alinroc → u/Ar4iii]

Exec sp_helptext ‘procname’

The formatting sucks though

[u/santathe1 → u/alinroc]

Change the output format to text (Ctrl+T) and it should format it the way it is in the stored proc.

[u/Ar4iii → u/alinroc]

Yes which makes in useless for me at least.

[u/SirGreybush]

VS Code, similar features, has DevOps integration, 100% free.

Plus VS Code is more flexible like Snowflake, DBT, other data platforms

[u/jshine13371]

In SSMS world you are either buying Redgate, working with SqlPackage and DACPACs, or doing it by hand. Redgate is excellent and also costs considerably more. This is the actual reason I switched.

Not at all. There's a hundred different solutions to this, many unpaid ones, and other paid one's that are cheap.

My personal favorite is SQL Examiner which I've been using for a decade and used to only be $100. Now it's slightly more, but it's still just a one time cost for a tool you can use forever basically. It's packed with a ton of features and even let's you cross compare database systems if you're supporting multiple types. It also has a data comparison and migration tool too.

The editor is the other one. Native IntelliSense is still weak, it gets confused by aliases and CTEs and gives up on bigger schemas.

This is basically untrue with AI auto-completion now. The most useful thing I've found AI for in the database layer, as someone who is generally not a fan of it at all.

Personally SSMS has always been the most feature rich tool when working with SQL Server and I've never had a need to use an alternative.

[u/SonOfSerb]

I use Toad for SQL Server. It's good.

[u/my-ka]

Nah

It is too old. Ssms is stil the best for ms sql.

Fir a generic developer it can be vs code with plugins Or dbever (ukrainian)or datagrip (russian)