Recently I’ve been doing a bit of development work in the MS SQL space and one of the frustrations I had was (my) inability to quickly show the schema information for a specific table within Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – I’d got use to Oralce’s SQL Developer. I have recently stumbled across the fact that this information is available to you at your figure tips simply by highlighting the table and schema name in the SQL editor window (you must be connected to the database) and pressing ALT-F1. This presents you with:

• basic table properties – name, owner, type and create date.
• column properties – name, type, length, precision, scale, nullable flag, etl.
• identity properties.
• Row GUID column.
• Filegroup location.
• Index properties – name, description, keys.
• Constraint properties – name, type, actions, keys, status.
• Foreign Key References – definition.

This information is displayed in the Results window and you can easily drag and drop names or other data directly from the results to your editor window (click the field and then drag as two deliberate actions) – a great back-up for when autocomplete decides to sleep.
Jono