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My company has been using SqlServer 2000 since, well, close to 2000 and we are in the midst of rewriting our old core application (about 70-80 users managing payroll, billing and accounting information). So we decided to go for the gold and switch to SqlServer 2008 - which has many advancements over 2000. We're really just getting started, trying to learn the differences and improvements. Of course, one of the differences is between Query Analyzer/Enterprise Manager and Managment Studio (MS). Does anyone else here use MS 2008? They've made some imrovements over 2005 (which most of us are probably familiar with from Sql Express).

For the most part it's growing on me, but there are a few things that kind of irritate me about it:

1) It seems to be very slow. They changed fully over to SMO, the .NET managed version of the old COM DMO libraries. DMO was much faster, and I'm not really sure why SMO is slow, but since I've been learning to program with SMO I do kind of like how it's classes are organized and how to use them. I guess it's just a matter of more overhead with a wrapper. SMO is very powerful -- you can just about create your own SqlServer from scratch with it (which I have no intention of ever wanting to do).

2) The object explorer does not accept keystrokes like enterprise manager did. When you click on a table and then press a key (which would normally bring you to the next table that starts with that letter), it just moves on down to the next category in the tree, not the next table. That seems like a bug to me - just no reason for it. Of course, you can use the Object Details tab to do that kind of key-searching, but the details tab is not independent enough to be used without explorer. Having gotten used to key stroke navigation, this is really annoying.

3) I love the fact that the a query tab now has intellisense like VS (pretty much the IDE is borrowed from VS) - but it does not automatically refresh itself. This means that if you add a table or a column or a proc then it does not get recognized by intellisense until you manually refresh the intellisense cache. I can't imagine what decision process led to that logic -- maybe they were trying to save unnecessary refreshes, but pretty much when you are doing these kinds of changes you are typically wanting to use them very soon. What's worse, command to refresh the cache is buried in the menu system - for something that is frequently required, you'd think they would have added a button to the tool bar for it. I added one manually. This may sound trivial, but when the pre-comiler is constantly producing red squigglies telling you that the object does not exist when you just added it, it gets old real fast.

4) When you click the Create new query button, it creates it with a connection to the default database, NOT the one that you have selected in Explorer. When you have live and test databases of very similar schemas making this mistake can be disaterous. We had to make a rule that you cannot have MS connecting to more than one database at a time - open a new instance of MS to do this. Man, what an oversight! They want you to right click on the database itself and then choose New Query from the menu -- but this is not anything like what you did with Query Analyzer. This change is just asinine.

Anyhow, that's the top four for now. I'm sure I'll find more quirks. DO any of you have any?