As part of my product management role I regularly attend trade shows and man the Red Gate booth in the vendor exhibition hall. Amongst other things this involves giving product demos to customers. Our latest demo involves SQL Source Control and SQL Test in a continuous integration environment.

In order to demonstrate quite how easy it is to set up our tools from scratch we start the demo by creating an entirely new database to link to source control, using an individual database name for each conference attendee. In SQL Server Management Studio this can be done either by selecting New Database from the Object Explorer or by executing “CREATE DATABASE DemoDB_John” in a query window.

We recently extended the demo to include SQL Test. This uses an open source SQL Server unit testing framework called tSQLt (www.tsqlt.org), which has a CLR object that requires EXTERNAL_ACCESS to be set as follows:

ALTER DATABASE DemoDB_John SET TRUSTWORTHY ON

This isn’t hard to do, but if you’re giving demo after demo, this two-step process soon becomes tedious.

This is where SQL Prompt snippets come into their own.

I can create a snippet named create_demo_db for this following:

CREATE DATABASE DemoDB_John
GO
USE DemoDB_John
GO
ALTER DATABASE DemoDB_John SET TRUSTWORTHY ON

Now I just have to type the first few characters of the snippet name, select the snippet from SQL Prompt’s candidate list, and execute the code.

Simple!

The problem is that this can only work once due to the hard-coded database name. Luckily I can leverage a nice feature in SQL Server Management Studio called Template Parameters.

If I modify my snippet to be:

CREATE DATABASE <DBName,, DemoDB_>
GO
USE <DBName,, DemoDB_>
GO
ALTER DATABASE <DBName,, DemoDB_> SET TRUSTWORTHY ON

Once I’ve invoked the snippet, I can press Ctrl-Shift-M, which calls up the Specify Values for Template Parameters dialog, where I can type in my database name just once.

Now you can click OK and run the query. Easy.

Ideally I’d like for SQL Prompt to auto-invoke the Template Parameter dialog for all snippets where it detects the angled bracket syntax, but typing in the keyboard shortcut is a small price to pay for the time savings.