This post describes some of the improvements we’ve made in the latest version of SQL Prompt.

Code suggestions

In recent months, the focus of the SQL Prompt development team has been to remove annoyances and improve code suggestions.

Here’s just a few of the improvements to code suggestions we’ve made in SQL Prompt 6.3:

• The suggestions box is no longer shown when there are no suggestions

• Suggestions are now shown if you continue to type a half-completed word

• More suggestions for new SQL Server 2014 syntax

• Improvements to partial match suggestions

• Improved suggestion ordering

As well as improving suggestions, we’ve also added some new features.

Select in Object Explorer

You can now use SQL Prompt to select an object in the Object Explorer from a query window.

This is useful because many SSMS features are available from an object’s Object Explorer context menu (eg select top 1000 rows, design, script as).

To select an object in the Object Explorer, place the cursor over the object you want to select and press Ctrl + F12:

Here’s a short video of the feature in action.

$SELECTIONSTART$ and $SELECTIONEND$ placeholders

You can now use $SELECTIONSTART$ and $SELECTIONEND$ placeholders in your snippet code. The code between these placeholders is selected when you insert the snippet.

For example, the following snippet:

$SELECTIONSTART$SELECT TOP 100 * FROM Table1$SELECTIONEND$

is inserted as:

You can then press F5 to run the selected snippet code.

For the full list of snippet placeholders you can use, see the documentation.

Highlighting matching parentheses

If your cursor is next to an opening or closing parenthesis in a query, SQL Prompt now automatically highlights the matching parenthesis:

You can then use the SSMS and Visual Studio shortcut Ctrl + ] to move between parentheses.

More improvements

Those are just a few of the improvements in SQL Prompt 6.3. For the full list of features and bug fixes, see the release notes.