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SSMS - Terminology for Select & Edit

Terminology question. In SSMS, when you list the various tables and right click on one, you get the 'Select Top 1000 Rows' & 'Edit Top 200 Rows', and depending on which on you click, it will take you to an interface that looks similar to the other, but clearly works differently. Does Microsoft have a specific name for these two interfaces? I had wanted to look up some settings for these and realized I don't even know what they're called. I've always called them Select Mode and Edit Mode, but searching that hasn't yielded anything useful.

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Solution

  • The "Select top 1000 Rows" takes you to a query editor with a prewritten query in the below fore and automatically runs it:

    /****** Script for SelectTopNRows command from SSMS  ******/
SELECT TOP (1000) <Column Name>
      [,<Column Name> ...
       ,<Column Name>]
  FROM <Database Name>.<Schema Name>.<Object Name>

    The window at the bottom is the results pane.

    The "Edit Top 200 Rows" launches a query designer, based on the a similar query to the above (but the database name is omitted and the schema might be). Forget you ever saw this, and never use it again. The "feature" is actually full of bugs, it lacks functionality and support for a lot of features (especially newer ones, like temporal tables), and has some interesting "quirks". If you need to "edit" your data then write the appropriate INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements to alter your data.