JJ B (6/10/2013)
I do not understand the point of this Editorial. I do not know anything about the the GUI tools in SSMS for creating tables, but I am familiar with both MS Access and ERwin. For SQL Server databases, I always model database changes in the ERwin file first. I then use ERwin to generate the SQL code which I run in SSMS when appropriate.
I used the MS Access GUI tools early on. I eventually found they left me with as bad a design as the designer (me) could come up with.
As far as ERWin, I've never had a chance to use it. And many others haven't either. In many companies the DBA is an accidental one with the job thrown at a sysadmin or a developer that had the job thrown at them. The add-on tools are too expensive or not known about. So the DBAs only have the SSMS tools to use.
Then there is a generation of us that didn't have GUI's to really work with. I started in SQL 7 in the late 90's. You had to code by hand no matter what to get to the extended stuff to start with.
So you are now sitting here and saying that you don't think it is valuable to know how to do it by hand just lacks weight with me. There should always be the ability to do it by hand. Without the basics, the rest is shifting sands.
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Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.