Skip to main content

Hiding user tables in SQL Management Studio

I spotted a question over at Stack Overflow asking whether it is possible to hide specific SQL Server user-tables from end users. Strictly speaking it is not, but there is a trick to get superfluous tables out of the way of the "Tables" node of the object explorer. While, on first glance, this may seem like poor practise, it turns out that there's a bona-fide case for it: Garbage tables used in table partitions.

A data warehouse that I recently delivered makes extensive use of SQL's partitioned tables feature - which enabled a data-load design which does incremental fast-loads... something which simply isn't possible without partitions.

The down-side of using partitions is that, in order to keep a fact table on-line whilst loading in new data, you effectively need three tables:

  1. The fact table
  2. A staging table, into which new data is loaded and prepared
  3. A garbage table into which the old partition of the fact table can be switched

The garbage table is of absolutely no value other than as a means for nuking a data partition, and so there's really very little value in cluttering Management Studio's Tables tree with these tables.

The answer? Mark the garbage tables as "database tools support" tables. This causes SSMS to hide the tables from normal view and instead list them under the "System Tables" node. Nice'n'neat!

Here's a script template which you can add to your template explorer:

EXEC sp_addextendedproperty
@name = N'microsoft_database_tools_support',
@value = '',
@level0type ='schema',
@level0name ='',
@level1type = 'table',
@level1name = N'.

<>'

Either add it to your template explorer, or simply paste into a query window, then press CTRL+SHIFT+M to launch the "specify values..." dialog.

Enjoy!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Zip files in PowerQuery / M

Being a fan of PowerBI, I recently looked for a way to read zip files directly into the Data Model, and found this blog which showed a usable technique. Inspired by the possibilities revealed in Ken's solution, but frustrated by slow performance, I set out to learn the M language and write a faster alternative. UnzipContents The result of these efforts is an M function - UnzipContents - that you can paste into any PowerBI / PowerQuery report. It takes the contents of a ZIP file, and returns a list of files contained therein, along with their decompressed data: If you're not sure how to make this function available in your document, simply: Open up PowerQuery (either in Excel or in PowerBI) Create a new Blank Query. Open up the Advanced Editor  (found on the View tab in PowerBI). Copy-Paste the above code into the editor, then close the editor. In the properties window, rename the the function to  UnzipContents Usage Using the function is fairly straight for...
Read more

Power Query: Transforming YYYYMM dates (the quick way)

Accountants. Their unit of work seems to be the month, as if individual days don't exists, or don't count somehow. Nowhere is this better seen than in the notion of the accounting period , which all too often follows the form YYYYMM.  Try converting this directly into a date and Power Query starts making excuses faster than a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. The quick solution to this is to understand what Power Query's Table.TransformColumns does, and then leverage this knowledge to transform your YYYYMM values into proper date type columns. Table.TransformColumns As it's name suggests, this handy function allows you to convert the contents of a column from one type to another. The basic syntax is: = Table.TransformColumns( #"Your Source Table", { A list of tuples, specifying the columns and what functions to apply to each value} ) Lists {denoted by curly braces} are something you need to get comfortable with if you...
2 comments
Read more

Loading data from an Oracle source

Building Business Intelligence using the Microsoft BI stack in an organization that has an Oracle based transactional system is not uncommon, and here I'll outline a couple of tips and tricks that should ease the building of SSIS packages in that type of environment.   Attunity Components Attunity offer several nice solutions for getitng data out of Oracle and into SQL - one of which is their CDC (Change Data Capture) offering . If you don't have the budget or stomach for setting up CDC in an oracle environment, then your next best bet is to use the free Attunity oracle connectors for SSIS , which demonstrate a measurable performance boost.   The Oracle Index and Order By Gotcha In previous posts I mention the performance benefits of loading sorted data into target tables. I'm currently loading data from Oracle 10, which exhibits a rather strange characteristic... Oracle does not use make us of an index for ordering data .  In other words, Oracle only uses ...
Post a Comment
Read more