Your work may not be lost

Thanks for sharing, Roman! I had a crash last week and lost a bunch of work. Hopefully this will save me next time.

I believe this is fixed in 2008 R2. I had the recovery screen come up yesterday :)

Here are three related items:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=291355

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=346646

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=519645

This has happened to me before - too many times...  

The "Query Execution History" feature of SSMS Tools Pack is invaluable:

http://www.ssmstoolspack.com/

The add on has a lot of other useful features, but it's worth it for the execution history alone. :-)

Wiseman82, I use Mladen's tool pack all the time, and finally got around to donating today in order to help support ongoing development.

However, if SSMS crashes, I think your query execution history goes away with it, doesn't it?

Nope, SSMS Tools Pack saves automatically all the queries executed in SSMS in a separate folder, with sub-folders for each day, so in the eventuality of a SSMS crash, all the queries are saved in a different place.

This "Tools Pack" is invaluable indeed...

Thanks Virgil, I didn't even notice that part of the feature.  I'd always used it instead of multi-level undo to go back and correct a bad cut/paste job.

There are a number of configuration options available for the execution history.  You can change the save interval as required and you can also choose to store history in a SQL table if you prefer.  By default it will save the history to the file system as Virgil described.

Aaron,

Maybe it is less prone to crashes if we turn of Intellisense?

I turned it off and use SQL Prompt instead. It seems like it crashes less frequently. Is it just me?

Alex, I find both the built-in IntelliSense and SQLPrompt get in my way more than they help me, though in preparing for SQL Saturday I have been alternating between both.  We obviously have different usage patterns, because I can think of maybe two or three times since the Katmai beta where SSMS crashed, and none of them were recently (the last one I remember was in June, and only because I could look it up - and even that was a hang that I was able to resolve, or could likely have waited for).  So I certainly would not be able to observe any difference between native and 3rd party IntelliSense.

Alex, how often does SSMS crash for you?  What is the nature of the crash, and what activity are you typically doing when it happens?

Adam,

I think I haven't had a single crash since before Christmas. I had a few before, but I do not log or record them in any way. Sorry I don't have more details...

Roman,

That thing about wireless cards might be it - I haven't used mine in a while.

I have it crash every few weeks, normally because it can't get a window handle. I've had that happen on two separate machines.

Thanks for this post. This saved me redoing a couple hours of work when I neglected to save and SSMS crashed.