When I first worked with sql 2008 management studio ,I really enjoyed the new intellisense feature ,for instance the ability to work from the query environment without going to the object explorer to get object names for my queries is really a big time saver ,I discovered that I can even use table aliases and the intellisense still works :
It is also the ability to reference declared variables without remembering the exact names is really cool:
Or remembering the exact names of dynamic management views:
But for me there are more than just improving productivity ,it has some potential performance improvement (probably some of you are scratching their heads wondering what the hell am I talking about …let’s see if I can convince you…) , this can have implications on how now users will reference object names in there stored procedures and SQL batches in their code ,if in the past many programmers who wrote SP’s did not bother to use fully qualified object names ,for example I can write “dbo.MyTable” or just “MyTable” and sql server will still find the correct table in the “dbo” schema (assuming the default schema of the user is different and there is no “myTable” in this schema).so ? What this has to do with intellisense?
Well it might sound stupid, but intellisense will cause users to schema qualify there object names because it is the natural search path, and qualify there object names with schema names, this eliminates the need for sql server to search object names when you do not qualify an object with the schema, this has performance impact, so in the long term it is not just a cool feature is it?