I use Epsilon programmer's editor (little E for PC, evolved from Emacs) which I learned at Carnegie Mellon almost 20 years ago. Notepad/Wordpad and application development environments with built-in editors have made it hard to explain to DBAs and to developers what a real programmer's editor is. Epsilon is more useful and flexible than specialized "data cleansing" tools as well. In my view, a person who doesn't have a tool that performs a regular expression search is not a **real** programmer.
Query Analyzer does its job; Epsilon does its job; they work well together. Code repository is a separate job, not to be confounded with editing.
Feature: Auto Script generating
Along the same lines as centralized code such, but a scripting tool to help you pass the same code to multiple servers quickly, for example, you have a script, sproc etc, that you run against every server in your organization. It'd be nice to be able to select each sever from a list and have the code to run it against each server generated for you so you can just hit run. Sure I Can do it with more code, but it'd be great if I didn't have to. Something along the lines of what Hyena by Systemtools can do for network administration.
i really miss the rectangular copy feature of Brief, how many times do you get an email thats got text pasted in column formatting that you only want to use columns 20 thru 30 for the task at hand.
you can't do anything like that in a microsoft editor...
One of the features they pulled from 2005 is the Auto Complete feature. This is helpful for someone who is new to a DB/Table, as well as improves the ability to quickly add items needed.
Would like to see one where the AutoComplete works across Databases and Servers.
Also, ability to easily go to a graphical view and back to scipt mode (think MS Access, or Enterprise Manager Views), but also smart enough to handle CASE and other statements that normally are not graphically displayed.
Able to create/learn your coding style, and apply to code (Formatting Script), this includes use of Tabs, how to structure SELECT statments, your Column List, etc.
I wish MS would just make the changes, why should we have to depend on 3rd party vendors?
Some of the most obvious ones that should have been in QA long ago and will be very disappointing if they are not in 2005:
Parenthesis () checker!!!!!! Please don't make me yet again check manually the ltrim(rtrim(str())) statement I just wronte. - As a side note, why the heck isn't there an alltrim() in T-SQL????
Intellisense/AutoComplete! Functions (substring, dateadd, etc) and procs should give you a tool tip to remind you of arguments as you type. Tables and view should have Intellisense so you can type "select authors. " and have a list of all the fields from the table authors.
Auto Correct! How many times have you typed "selcet col from table"?
Code Snippets! Something better then templetes. Also, when I type "case" or "if" the IDE should know what is coming next and create the outline of the construct.
Auto Formatting! Indent and format views, procs, and adhoc queries.
