Instead of working, I blog.

I had a comment on one of my last posts that suggested that I talk about a few things and this is the first thing that struck my interest because it’s a topic that’s close to my heart.  And of course, I’m talking about getting away from the GUI and learning to do things at the command line.

And I know that SQL Server was built around the cmdline and a lot of you cling to it for all of your daily tasks, but you’ve just got to get past it and start doing things in the GUI.  No wait, reverse that.

So why do I want you to get off the GUI?  Well for starters you never really know a system until you code in it.  You can go your entire life not knowing what goes on under the covers if you’re just clicking around and now you’re never learning anything.  So when problems come up you have no idea how to fix them because you’ve never bothered learning how anything works.

OK, I could sit here and write everything out in anecdotes but since time’s of the essence and my boys are going crazy this morning, I’ll just put it in a list with comments.

1.  GUI is limited – quite often the GUI won’t do everything you need it to do.  This comes up quite often working with security, but also things like CDC and data compression.  The GUI just doesn’t have all the features the cmdline does.  Backup/restore is another good example because you can’t do page-level restores in the GUI.

2.  GUI isn’t scalable – You can’t save GUI actions and reproduce them for several boxes.  If you code a solution you can code in parameters that allow you to run the same code against different objects.  I think user accts are a good example.  What if you have to add a user to all 200 DBs on your server, or on 10 servers?  What are you gonna do?  Click through those perms on all 2000 DBs?  It’ll take you days.  Meanwhile at the cmdline you can run it against all boxes at once and be done in just a couple mins.  Seriously, you can’t beat that.  So everything you do at the GUI you have to reproduce every time you need to perform that task.

3.  Gui provides no knowledge – Like I said already, if you always use the GUI then you never learn much because you don’t ever have any exposure to the inner workings.

4.  GUI is single-task based – Everything you do in the GUI is a single action.  You can’t do too multiple tasks as once and you can’t set them up in transactions so they all pass or fail together.  What if you needed to add a user to SQL and to Windows?  You can do it in powershell at the same time, but in the GUI you have to physically click through and do them yourself.  And what if you wanted to make it so that if one of them failed they both did?  You can’t do that in the GUI.

5.  GUI is typically longer – Even though the GUI is more friendly sometimes, it often takes longer to click through the screens than it does to type the cmds… at least for those of us who can type.

6.  GUI is slower – Many times the GUI has been slower to accomplish a task.  I’ve had the GUI take quite a bit of time or even freeze up on me while trying to do something when the cmdline finished in just a couple secs.  So the GUI isn’t nearly as efficient.

7.  GUIs don’t multitask well – While Yukon brought us the ability to have GUI tasks running in the background while we work in SSMS, you can still only do so many things that way.  You can multitask much better at the cmdline because you can offload it easier to other boxes or just schedule scripts to kick off.  Again, you can’t schedule a GUI operation.

Look… GUIs are fine when you’re a beginner.  They ease the burden of learning something new and when a new technology comes out I quite often start with the GUI just to get my feet wet.  But then I switch to the cmdline pretty quickly and do it in there the rest of the time. 

And there’s not much excuse for not learning the cmdline anymore since Yukon brought us the ability to generate the code for our actions and Katmai has improved on that.  Now if you do something in the GUI  you’re not sure how to do in the cmdline, you just script it from the GUI and learn something.  Now you can just modify it for your purposes.  I do that sometimes still.

I was really lucky when I started learning SQL in that the guy teaching me was a huge cmdline buff and insisted that I did everything that way.  Also, I emulated the MVPs who all touted the cmdline so I figured if it was good enough for them then I should be doing it too.  So in that respect I was lucky to learn that lesson early.

I hope some of you now learn that lesson here and start trying to do your jobs at the cmdline.  It’ll be tough at first, but in a yr you’ll be really glad you took the pains.

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