25 September 2025

Use SQL Management Studio to Access Dataverse

I consider being able to look at the data during development very important. So far, for inspecting data in Dataverse I have used maker environment and runtime environment. It’s a simple if somewhat inflexible option. Also, I have used XrmToolbox and SQL 4 CDS plugin. That’s better from the flexibility standpoint, but XrmToolbox somehow looks and feels like a toy:

XrmToolbox screenshot

and origin of plugins and what they might do in the background always made me uneasy.

Then, just today, I discovered that one can simply use SQL Management Studio.

SQL Management Studio accessing dataverse tables screenshot

Much simpler and better. Highly recommend.