Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better

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A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS Part two of a four-part series of blogs
Even though Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio and PostgreSQL use the same underying language (SQL), the user interface and dialects are quite different at times, as this blog explains. A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better (this blog) Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS

Part two of a four-part series of blogs

Even though Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio and PostgreSQL use the same underying language (SQL), the user interface and dialects are quite different at times, as this blog explains.

A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS
Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better (this blog)
Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL
Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 March 2026

In this blog

SSMS is easier to use
SSMS has a query and view designer
Database diagrams in SSMS vs ERD diagrams in PG Admin

These are the areas where I've found SQL Server Management Studio to be a better programming environment than PG Admin:

I haven't included in this page any areas in which I think T-SQL outperforms PostgreSQL because ... I haven't found any! In general I prefer the Postgres implementation of SQL, as you'll see if you read on in this series of blogs.

SSMS is easier to use

Although there's not that much in it, I do find SSMS easier to use than PG Admin - here are 3 concrete examples of this.

Firstly, Intellisense in SSMS is better than autocompletion in PG Admin:

The list of fields appears much more quickly (and more reliably) in SSMS, and is easier to read (in PG Admin on the right you often have to wait a half-second while the autocompletion loads).

SSMS also allows you to type in parts of a column name to hone in on it in a list (for example you could type dollars to get the two financial fields in the above example). You will miss this if you convert to Postgres!

As a second example, in SSMS you can double-click on an error to take you to the offending line - in PG Admin you can't do this:

As always the error is comma-related here!

And as a third example, SSMS allows you to send output to either a grid, text or a file:

You can do this to some extent in PG Admin, but not in such an obvious way.

Notwithstanding all of the above, the experiences of programming SQL in SSMS and PG Admin are remarkably similar.

SSMS has a query and view designer

There's no equivalent of the SSMS Query Designer in PG Admin:

The Query Designer allows you to see a visual representation of your tables.

Purists will probably say "And a good thing too!", but I'm not a purist! Many delegates on our courses struggle with the syntax of creating joins, so the Query Designer gives them a way to begin their SQL queries easily.

Database diagrams in SSMS vs ERD diagrams in PG Admin

Here's an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) in PG Admin:

The diagram can be made to look nice like this, and pleasingly all of the lines join the correct fields!

A database diagram in SSMS, by contrast, initially doesn't look as good as an ERD diagram in PG Admin:

Most irritatingly, the lines don't always seem to link to the correct fields.

However, database diagrams have one huge advantage - they're live:

If you add, edit or delete a line, you're adding, editing or deleting the underlying relationship.

This makes them much more useful!

Parts of this blog
A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better (this blog) Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

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