Making SSMS Beep

Today I read a post from my good friend Colin Stasiuk (aka @BenchmarkIT) where he talked about making SSMS beep when a query has completed.

I didn’t know this was such a well guarded secret.  Which leads me to a story to share.  I had a supervisor (Ed) back at EarthLink who made it a point to have story time during his pre-shift meetings, those were the best days to be working.  I remember that Ed was on vacation once and our assistant supervisor Dennis was running the team.  Well instead of telling us a story, he brought in a kids picture book to read to us.  It was awesome, there were about 80-90 tech support reps all sitting in the break room hanging on every word from a book for 2 year olds.  Funniest sight ever.

But that’s a whole different story than the one I wanted to share.

One one particularly long night at EarthLink, back in 2001 or so (I was using SQL 2000 at the time), I had a lot of database data changes to make (I have no idea why at this point).  Probably business rules had changes so data needed to be changed, and indexes needed to be changed, or something.  Needless to say SQL was going to be running queries all night long.

Well, having already worked 12-16 hours that day, I didn’t really want to stay up all night watching SQL run.  So I cranked up the speakers on the PC as load as they would go (I had some nice speakers so they got loud), and set Windows to as load as it would go (I’m a heavy sleeper) and started the first of the T/SQL Scripts.  I promptly curled up on the floor with my pillow and blanket that I had brought in and went to sleep.  About three hours later I was woken up by the loudest “Windows ping” ever.  It really scared the crap out of me, but it did the job.  I checked what ever it was that needed checked and started the next script.

This happened probably three or four times through out the night.  The next morning I took a shower (we had showers on site for just such nights), and changed my clothes (my wife was kind enough to bring me a change of clothes before she went to bed) and went on with my new work day, after technically pulling an all nighter that I slept through about 99% of.

If only all, all nighters were that easy.

Denny