There's nothing that really bothers me more than finding odd, buggy features in software and then discovering it happens by design. This happened to me today with SQL Server 2008 Management Studio.

This afternoon, one of my SQL developers came to saying he was having a problem with his new install of SQL Server 2008 Management Studio. Since we are only beginning our move to SQL 2008 from 2005, I had not yet experienced this problem myself. He expanded the Stored Procedures node under one of our main databases and was presented with the following message:

"See object explorer details for objects in this folder"

And of course, no stored procedures were shown in the treeview. Same story with the tables in another database. My immediate reaction was that this had to be a problem with the studio, as I had not seen this on my development machine; but I had also not looked at the same database. Naturally, I go back to my development machine, connect to the same server and database and find I have the same problem.

After a bit of research, I learn this is actually a "feature" brought to us by our friends at Microsoft. http://connect.microsoft.com/SQL/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=362453

For the life of me, I still can't figure this one out. My production databases are not enormous, but large (1tb+) and there are well over 2,000 tables and over 2,000 stored procedures. Clearly, I'm a victim of this "feature."

The big question for me, is that if this is such a giant issue, why have I never had a single issue with loading this many items into the treeview in SQL 2005 Management Studio!!??