Yes, you heard me right. SSMS 2015. No I’m not one of those crazy recruiters who keep asking for 10 years of experience with SQL 2013. Well, technically it’s a preview of a separate install of SSMS for SQL 2016.

SQL Server Management Studio June 2015 preview

There are supposed to be some nice advantages too.

• Stand alone lightweight installer
• Easily check for updates
• Flag to turn off the annoying “Save unsaved query windows” warning when you close SSMS
• Much more support for Azure

 
I’m actually really excited by this. It will nice to have a stand alone installer for SSMS and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it works.

From what I hear the installer works pretty well too. Unfortunately right now I’m having a bit of a problem with it myself. I appear to be stuck at one particular step, probably due to resource constraints. (I only have 6gb of RAM and a fairly slow internet connection). This is a preview and who knows, maybe I’ve found a bug. I’ll leave the install running over night and let you know if it comes up with anything. I’ll also try to post an update once I’ve played with it for awhile.

EDIT: So I managed to get it to install. I finally got it to give me a log and when I checked out the log I noticed a write error. That being the case I tried running the install again using Run As Administrator. This time the install completed just fine. And in fact it was really very quick compared to a number of other installers. Now it’s time to set things up. Aaron Bertrand’s (b/t) color scheme, change the New Query template and map a keyboard shortcut to change connection. And of course open up my common windows (Object Explorer, Template Explorer, Solution Explorer, Registered Servers).