Managing and debugging SQL queries in MS Access

Question

MS Access has limited capabilities to manage raw SQL queries: the editor is quite bad, no syntax highlighting, it reformats your raw SQL into a long string and you can\'t in

Answer 1

For debugging, I edit them in a separate text editor that lets me format them sensibly. When I find I need to make changes, I edit the version in the text editor, and paste it back to Access, never editing the version in Access.

Still a major PITA.

Answer 2

Expanding on this suggestion from Smandoli:

NO:   DoCmd.RunSQL ("SELECT ...")
YES:  strSQL = "SELECT ..."
      DoCmd.RunSQL (strSQL)

If you want to keep the SQL code in an external file, for editing with your favorite text editor (with syntax coloring and all that), you could do something like this pseudo-code:

// On initialization:
global strSQL
f = open("strSQL.sql")
strSQL = read_all(f)
close(f)

// To to the select:
DoCmd.RunSQL(strSQL)

This may be a bit clunky -- maybe a lot clunky -- but it avoids the consistency issues of edit-copy-paste.

Obviously this doesn't directly address debugging SQL, but managing code in a readable way is a part of the problem.

Answer 3

Similar to recursive, I use an external editor to write my queries. I use Notepad++ with the Light Explorer extension for maintaining several scripts at a time, and Notepad2 for one-off scripts. (I'm kind of partial to Scintilla-based editors.)

Another option is to use the free SQL Server Management Studio Express, which comes with SQL Server Express. (EDIT: Sorry, EdgarVerona, I didn't notice you mentioned this already!) I normally use it to write SQL queries instead of using Access, because I typically use ODBC to link to a SQL Server back end anyway. Beware that the differences in the syntax of T-SQL, used by SQL Server, and Jet SQL, used by Access MDB's, are sometimes substantial.