When you are connecting to a SQL Server instance, you will need to click on the ‘Options’ button: This presents a visual indication of the environment in which you are running your scripts. Hence when you connect with a particular environment, it uses the same assigned color. The color is displayed in the SSMS status bar, at the bottom. PROD – Red, MOCK – Orange, QA – Yellow, DEV – Blue and Local – Green Personally, I prefer to set the below colors for my environments. SSMS provides us with an ability to set different colors for connection to separate environments. Also, think about a scenario when you have a data manipulation script to be executed in different environments, isn’t it a big advantage to have a visual differentiation between the environments you are executing your scripts against?
This often becomes unmanageable and difficult to keep track of.
Use custom colors to differentiate between environmentsĭuring our day to day work in SSMS, generally we have to shift between different environments – Local/DEV/QA/MOCK/PROD, resulting in the creation of multiple query tabs – with each query tab connected to different environments.
I have been using SSMS for a long time now, and over the period of time I have realized that it’s a very powerful IDE – however, there are lots of hidden features which are less known to lots of developers.