Sql Search database dropdown issue

MSW

Was curious if there is a known bug already reported for Sql Search's database dropdown?  Either after having SSMS open for a long period of time or switching back and forth between servers the Database dropdown will be missing every option and checkbox controls in the dropdown other than "All Databases".   This has been going on for me over multiple versions so its not anything that popped up in the most recent version or anything.  Probably been happening for multiple months at least, just got around to reporting it.   Also, if you restart SSMS it fixes it but eventually will happen again. Thanks.

Ben_P

Hi MSW, thank you for your post. I don't believe a bug report has been made, but I'll create one now so that the devs can look into a fix for this.  

MSW

Thanks Ben.

DWalker

I agree there is definitely a bug with it and the same thing happens to me. I actually restarted SSMS completely today and started searching for a specific text string going server by server. I would connect to a server, do my search and then disconnect from the server so there was never even a possibility of having multiple servers to choose from at one time. After doing about 15 servers, the "All databases" dropdown list eventually did not populate at all and was totally empty as MSW states. Clicking the "Refresh List" button  inside the dropdown did nothing either. As MSW stated, my only recourse was to restart SSMS all over again and then go back to the server where it stopped working before and start there.

From my perspective, SQL Search is a good app and I have been using it since it was initially released. It can however be brutally slow to populate when dealing with servers that have a lot of objects in them. I can easily sit here for 5+ minutes sometimes just waiting for everything to load before I can even do a search. My assumption is there is a caching problem and whoever did the programming did not do a good job of flushing and reloading it properly which causes these issues. They also didn't seem to account for handling databases with many objects very well. I just know it is a quirky app and sometimes I can do the exact same search multiple times and will suddenly get different results without changing anything. Because of that, I can never really trust it with a single search and often have to do them several times to be somewhat confident I didn't miss something. I've even searched for things that I absolutely knew were there and had it show no results. With it being a free tool, I have always just assumed they didn't put too much effort into perfecting it so I just try to live with it and get what I can out of it.