Interesting news dropped – Microsoft announced that Azure Data Studio is going to be retired in 2026. You can read the official announcement here. In some ways, I have to admit that I was a little surprised to see this.
I’ve been a very regular user of Azure Data Studio over the past several years, especially because it was the option for Linux. I believe the most likely reason they’re deprecating the product is because there’s a lot of effort in keeping up with Visual Studio Code’s changes and forking that code base every month for Azure Data Studio.
My concern is that the mssql extension for Visual Studio Code is nowhere near ready for prime time, and I wonder if it will be sufficiently capable by the time Azure Data Studio is gone for good.
Next Stellato will be tell us SSMS isnt needed either (lack of debugger for one)