SQL Editor

When you interact with MS SQL Server databases, you mostly do it by writing, editing, and executing SQL queries, statements, stored procedures, and scripts. A good SQL editor will help with database interaction by providing syntax highlighting, robust code completion functionality, the ability to get information about function parameters, and other features that make your coding experience more efficient.

SQL editor for dbForge Studio for SQL Server was designed with all these things in mind to satisfy both professional developers and beginners. We tried to create an editor that will optimize and streamline your work with SQL documents and, most importantly, save your time in the process.

In this article, we will take a closer look at each method and determine the differences between them.

Colorized Statements

In SQL Editor, statements are highlighted in blue so you can easily distinguish them from the rest of the code and quickly edit them as needed. This feature greatly increases code readability and general work efficiency.

Context-sensitive code completion

This visual SQL editor tool extracts context-sensitive features from the code and their relations to other code elements and auto-completes the current code with proper elements according to the chosen pattern.

Code collapsing/expanding with support of user-defined regions

Whenever you have a block of code (BEGIN....END, etc), SQL editor will put a little plus sign in the margin and allow you to "collapse" that block of code so that you only see the BEGIN part, while the rest of the block is hidden. If you're working with a really large set of code, this feature can bring an additional level of organization and convenience.

In addition, SQL Code Editor allows you to collapse and expand named regions that can simplify the navigation through the code.

SQL formatting with rich options

Improve readability, consistency, and standardization with SQL formatting. This feature allows you to easily define and share SQL coding standards among multiple developers. The trial functionality is available in online SQL Formatter. Our SQL code editor tool includes a wide choice of options for code formatting. Based on your needs, you can use three types of formatting:

• Automatic code formatting. This significantly saves your time. By default, when you finish a statement with a delimiter, it is automatically formatted.
• Manual code formatting. In case you want to format SQL code manually, decide whether you want to format all code in your script or only a specified statement.
• SQL formatter wizard. With its help, you can format multiple SQL files at once.

Try online SQL Formatter.

SQL snippets library with a browser window and editor

Code snippets are meant to help you type SQL code more quickly. You can use predefined snippets provided in the application and/or create your own to later insert them into SQL scripts and queries. Each snippet represents a statement or a group of statements fulfilling the same task, such as creating a new user or describing a package. You can insert the required code snippet into your source code in a few clicks.

Document Outline for quick navigation through large scripts

This window provides quick and easy navigation through report elements. It can be used while building a report to access all its elements and to see the report's overall structure.