With Microsoft touting Intellisense in just about all of their products, including Visual Studio, one would assume it’d show up in their flagship database product, SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately, the SQL Management Studio still doesn’t offer any prompting as you type in code, even though it’s based roughly on Visual Studio 2005.

Enter PromptSQL, an add-on product that offers Intellisense for SQL Server in several different editors. It supports not only Query Analyzer and SQL Management Studio, but also UltraEdit, my favorite text editor.

PromptSQL monitors your typing and helpfully pops up just like IntelliSense would. The best way to see it in action is to check out the screen shots on the home page of their web site.

It does a surprisingly good job for a standalone third-party application. You have to give it your SQL Server login information and it runs queries against your database to get the necessary information. It strikes me as a lot like Ajax, for whatever that’s worth.

It’s $50. At first, that seemed like a lot of money for something Microsoft usually includes for free in all of their products – but then if it was easy, I guess Microsoft would have included it in SQL Management Studio. I think I’ll buy it when I get back from vacation, but for now, I’m saving my money for more margaritas. 5 days and counting…