David Hayden has noted the final beta release of RedGate’s SQL Prompt 3 (formerly PromptSQL prior to being acquired by RedGate). I ditched an earlier version of this product after it consistently had speed issues, was annoyingly invasive when typing and troubles intellisensing after upgrading to SQL Server 2005. It worked great with SQL Server 2000 though, so it was time for me to give this another go.

My initial reaction is that it is a vastly improved product. Performance even for remote databases over the WAN was very fast. The release notes list a number of additional tweaks you can use to boost performance. It is easy to customise how it interacts with the editor in terms of when the auto-complete features appear and how they are selected.

The UI is nicer too - the auto-complete popup is sorted into categories that can be switched between using CTRL and the left and right arrows. This allows the auto-complete list to be quickly filtered to show a subset of all completions (such as only tables, views, SPs, etc.). By default it suggests a number of generally sensible completions based on the current context. A very nice feature is the column picker category - it lists all the columns available in the current query along with checkboxes. This is fantastic for writing long SELECT lists and ORDER BY clauses. Very nice so far! I’ll definitely keep it installed and see how it stacks up to longer term use.