One is never too old to learn, right? Here’s a Management Studio feature which has been introduced in SQL Server 2008. And I’ve discovered it about a month ago. Since then, I use it every day!
What am I talking about? Well, the Management Studio allows you to link a color to a connection. Each time when you open a window, the color of the status bar will change to the one linked to the connection to which your window is connected. Still with me? Alright, I’ll get the drawing board out.
To link a color to a connection, open up the Connect dropdown in the Object Explorer and choose Database Engine.
That opens up the following familiar screen:
Do you see the Options button indicated with the red arrow? Click it to open up additional options that you can set on your connection.
To link a color to the connection specified in the Login page, activate the Use custom color checkbox and select a color.
Now click the Connect button and open up a new query window. My favorite way of doing that is to open up the Databases tree node in the Object Explorer, select the database in which I’m interested, and hit CTRL+N.
With the new window open, did you notice the status bar?
Here you can see the status bars from two different query windows connected to two different instances on the same machine.
The way I use these colors is as follows:
- Green for the servers in the Development environment
- Orange for the servers in the Acceptance environment
- Red for the servers in the Production environment
This gives you an extra safeguard to ensure that you’re executing that TRUNCATE TABLE statement on the right server.
However, as usual there are some things to take into consideration.
Things To Keep In Mind
localhost is not the same as <YOUR_MACHINE_NAME>
Be careful when you’re connecting to SQL Server instances on the local machine. As the title above indicates: “localhost” and “BigBlue” are not the same (assuming that your PC is called BigBlue). If you want to avoid trouble, set up the same color for both connections from the beginning.
Registered Servers
If you’ve got a habit of using the Registered Servers window, it’s important to know that the color specified here is completely separated from the color specified on the same connection through the Connect to Server window.
In fact, I believe all connection settings are set up separately when using this tool.
Change Connection On Open Window
Be careful when you use the Change Connection button on an open window: it messes up the coloring. More precisely, it will keep the color of the previous connection.
There’s a bug filed on Microsoft Connect related to this, current status is Won’t Fix. Which seems a bit weird: I noticed different behavior on SQL Server 2008 R2. When changing my connection from SQL Server 2008 to R2, it would update the color to the one linked to R2. In the other direction, disconnecting from R2 and connecting to SQL 2008, it would not change the color.
Update: I’ve found a couple additional bug reports on Connect related to this feature. If you’d like to see some consistent coloring behavior (and avoid the risk of executing a TRUNCATE TABLE on the wrong server), please take a moment to vote Yes at the following pages.
Connect: Update status bar colour when changing connections
Connect: [SSMS] Make color coding of query windows work all the time
Conclusion
Currently, to get consistent coloring all the time, you need to set up the colour three times for each connection: once in the Connect to Server window, secondly in the Connect to Database Engine window (this is the window that you get when clicking the Change Connection button), and thirdly in the Registered Servers pane (if you’re using this pane).
That’s it for now, have fun coloring those status bars!
Valentino.
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