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Category: Azure Data Studio

Fun with Markdown in Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland takes us through some of the formatting options available in Azure Data Studio notebooks:

When working in a Notebook you have two types of cells, text and code.  The focus of this post is how to format the text cell.  Of course text goes into this cell so that part is easy and of course the text can say anything you would like to say.  When we work with text in Word, there is a format tool bar that we can use to make it look like we want it.  The text cells do not have this toolbar.

You might be asking, without the format toolbar, does that mean we can’t format the text?  That answer is no….we can still format the text, we just need to do it slightly different.  Rather than use a toolbar, we need to use characters.

There’s a lot of power in Markdown.

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Preventing Lost Code in Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows how you can keep from losing code when you close Azure Data Studio:

After working on a query for a long time, we want to make sure that we save the changes we have made.  I have lost hours of work over the years because I didn’t save the changes.  Azure Data Studio has a few features that can help prevent this from happening.

Read on to learn how. With SSMS, this had historically been the domain of third-party plugins, but it’s built into VS Code and ADS.

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Keeping Track of ADS Extension Updates

Published 2019-10-08 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows how you can find out-of-date extensions in Azure Data Studio:

As you add more and more extensions to Azure Data Studio,  keeping them up to date could present a challenge.  Of course we will want to install all the extensions that we think might be helpful to us.  Luckily Azure Data Studio has a nice way to let us know if there is an extension that is out of date.

Click through to see how.

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Azure Data Studio October 2019 Release

Published 2019-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the October 2019 release of Azure Data Studio:

While fixing a bug involving copying rows and columns from the results grid, we ended up creating an innovative copy/paste experience with the results grid.

Typically, when you select random cells individually, pasting this into a grid like in Excel will prevent the pasting. However, we’ve implemented a logical pattern that would support this type of pasting. This works by ignoring columns and rows that are not selected, and nulling columns and rows that were not included in the copy parameters.

I really like that copy-paste functionality. Time to go update…

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Azure Data Studio Process Explorer

Published 2019-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows us the process explorer in Azure Data Studio:

Notice that the pids all point to the azuredatestudio.exe processes.  Azure Data Studio provides just a bit more information than Task Manager.  Please be careful changing the state of a service.  In other words, be careful stopping a process unless it is a last restore approach to fixing an issue.

The first thing I thought when looking at it wasn’t the Task Manager; it was Chrome’s process explorer.

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Azure Data Studio Auto-Save

Published 2019-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland takes us through one nice feature of Azure Data Studio:

Azure Data Studio has many great features and even more if you add all the extensions that are available.  Many extensions are very useful now, even though they are still in preview.  These features are naturally compared to SQL Server Management Studio.  One feature I like that sort of exists I SSMS is the auto save feature.  This feature will automatically save your files when you close Azure Data Studio and will be there the next time you use ADS.  SSMS has the auto recovery option, but is works a bit differently so it isn’t quite the same. ADS has a setting named “Files: Hot Exit”.

Read on to see how it works.

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Automating Azure Data Studio Notebooks

Published 2019-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson has two separate ways of scheduling Azure Data Studio notebooks for us:

There are two new options for automating your SQL Notebooks with your SQL Servers. Earlier this month, the Insiders build of Azure Data Studio received the ability to add SQL Notebooks in SQL Agent. This past Friday (September 20th, 2019) a new version of the SqlServer PowerShell module was posted to the Gallery, with a new Invoke-SqlNotebook cmdlet.

Read on for demos of both.

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Creating Big Data Clusters with Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Niels Berglund takes us through the creation of a Big Data Cluster by using Azure Data Studio to generate a notebook:

I wrote a blog post back in November 2018, about how to install and deploy SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster on Azure Kubernetes Service. Back then SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster was in private preview, (CTP 2.1 I believe), and you had to sign up, to get access to the “bits”. Well, you did not really get any “bits”; what you did get was access to Python deployment scripts.

Now, September 2019, the BDC is in public preview (you do not have to sign up), and it has reached Release Candidate (RC) status, RC 1. The install method has changed, or rather, in addition to installing via deployment scripts, you can now also install using Azure Data Studio deployment notebooks, and that is what this blog post is about.

Having gone through this myself, there’s quite a bit of reading involved in the setup, but they make the process pretty smooth. This also shows off one of the key benefits of notebooks: documentation and code together.

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Azure Data Studio September Release

Published 2019-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the September release of Azure Data Studio:

As we continue to bring over key features from SQL Server Management Studio, one highly requested feature was enabling SQL Server command line (SQLCMD) mode in our Query Editor. SQLCMD mode allows users to write and edit queries as SQLCMD scripts. In addition, users can also execute the SQLCMD scripts.

This feature is now possible in Azure Data Studio.

Looks like there were several good improvements this month.

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