Sql-server – What’s the maximum number of characters you can copy from a cell

I suspect the "tragic tale" might be that someone who had sysadmin privileges (but shouldn't have) went in and deleted one of these things (possibly by mistake).

But another thought occurred to me: someone who should have sysadmin privileges might have done the same thing (by mistake).

In lieu of being able to cripple Management Studio (which I suppose you could do by writing your own an add-in), you should consider simply not logging in as sysadmin except when absolutely necessary.

At my old job we tried to implement a policy where by default you connect to SQL Server as you, and you are given the rights you should have for most tasks. When you need to escalate to do something out of the ordinary, only then do you connect as sysadmin. This worked with some success - however you need to be tolerant of the moaning and griping that will happen. We actually had different database roles such as a read only for our QA department - allowing them, say, to validate a report output by selecting from certain tables directly.

Modern versions of SSMS (2008+ at least) allow you to generate a change script once you have made changes to a table using the graphical designer. You go to the menu item Table Designer > Generate Change Script.

That said, I agree with Thomas. In the long term, you should be proficient at T-SQL so that you can write ALTER TABLE scripts without the help of the wizard / graphical designers. They often do things you don't want to do.