I’m getting my first experience working with the newest version of Microsoft’s SQL Server. We recently installed SQL Server 2008 at a client and we are setting up a web application on their servers now.
In my experience with SQL when I needed to edit data in a table I would right-click on the table name and select "Open Table" to display all the data in that table. I realize this probably isn’t the preferred or perhaps even "correct" method to use, but for me it worked, was quick and allowed me to immediately edit data in the table.
With SQL Server 2008 the "Open Table" option is now gone. Instead the select statement defaults to the Top 200 results. You can switch to SQL view and remove the "Top 200" specification, but it’s another step in the process.
What should have been done is to allow the user a configurable setting. Somewhere in preferences let the user specify if they’d rather have the entire table open or a "Top" list that they can still specify the number of rows to return.
My other challenge is that my SQL Server Management Studio 2005 application doesn’t suppress the "Open Table" command from the right-click contextual menu. Instead, it just gives me the error shown above. Now debating on whether I need to go ahead and upgrade to the latest version of the studio application. Hoping it won’t have negative impact on the older versions of SQL we’re also managing on other servers.