Rebecca Lewis plays a funeral dirge:
Azure Data Studio retires on February 28, 2026. No more updates, no more security patches, no more support. Microsoft announced this a year ago and has been pointing everyone toward VS Code with the MSSQL extension ever since.
Sounds straightforward. Install VS Code, add an extension, and carry on. Yet it is not really that simple, and it depends a lot on how you used ADS.
I appreciate that Rebecca has a table of functionality, including what is available right now and what is not yet ready. I remember trying the VS Code MSSQL extension early on and realizing just how much work they had to do, and it looks like they’ve done a good amount of that work. Running on Linux, I was always a proponent of Azure Data Studio, even when it was SQL Operations Studio and you had a messy bundle of files to install manually (I was one of the very early beta testers).
The good news is that I do believe the SQL Server tools team will continue development on this. The success of non-SSMS tools has been hit or miss, but having a multi-OS, developer-friendly way to interact with SQL Server is important.