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Bart

Software Engineer - Red Gate Software

A Gift for Phil Factor

Published Friday, August 31, 2007 11:30 AM

Look, temporary tables:

This also works for normal tables created in the script, as well as stored procedures, functions and views, and it'll all be available in the next SQL Prompt release, which should be within about two weeks all being well.

Originally this functionality was slated for SQL Prompt 3, but as you'll all be aware that took rather longer than we expected and we ended up dropping much of what we'd hoped to put in there. We're working on an article about that joyous saga that will appear on Simple Talk, hopefully in the next few weeks if I get time to finish it off (sorry Tony, Phil).

Also coming in the next release:


  • Data Dude support - both because it's technically easier than not supporting it (or so we originally thought), and because we've actually had quite a number of requests about it come in over the past month or so.

  • CTE support - never something we originally planned on supporting in SQL Prompt 3, but it's new functionality in SQL Server 2005 and is something we felt we should probably handle, although it's far from clear to me at least how popular these are.

  • Control flow statement support (IF, WHILE etc)- these previously didn't work brilliantly, which was less than ideal if you were writing a lot of functions or stored procedures, so we've shored up the support considerably.

  • Loads of bug fixes, plus some more tweaking of the performance. Notably, again because this could be enormously irritating in some situations, the popup no longer appears when you're entering an alias for a table, view etc in a FROM clause.

As I say, all this should be available in the next couple of weeks or so.

by Bart Read
Filed Under: ,
Attachment(s): TempTableExample.png

Comments

 

Adam Machanic said:

CTEs are definitely growing in popularity.  For the first 18 months or so after SQL 2005 RTM, I didn't see many except in my own code.  But this summer I've been on a few projects where I saw them heavily used.  So it appears that people are finally catching up with the new features and starting to figure out how to incorporate them.
September 3, 2007 1:16 PM
 

Bart Read said:

That's good to know. I can certainly see them becoming ever more popular as time goes on, and I imagine in a couple of years they'll be yet another piece of functionality that we all just take for granted.
September 4, 2007 5:26 AM
 

Phil Factor said:

Yes, I've been nagging Bart to put in this feature for some time. I'm really pleased that this is in place now. I realise that temporary tables are old hat nowadays but sometimes they provide by far the clearest way of performing a process and one can do a few neat things with them that you cannot do with a table variable. (Hmmm. maybe an idea for a blog-entry there)
September 6, 2007 11:30 AM
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About Bart Read

Bart has done many things since he started work at Red Gate Software Ltd in August 2004, but nowadays he's (mainly) the product manager for the .NET Developer Tools. He still feels like this is a bit like admitting you were cheering for the Empire whilst watching Star Wars, but for now he's along for the ride. In a previous incarnation he was a project manager leading the .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler 5, ANTS Performance Profiler 4 & 5, and SQL Prompt 3.0 - 3.6 projects. He still occasionally writes some code and, in the past, has touched the code for most of the Red Gate SQL developer tools... some of them still haven't recovered from the shock. He was born and grew up in Dorset, was educated in Nottingham and London, and likes music and real ale. His photo is extremely misleading.
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