A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
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.
Comments closedDave Bland shows how you can find out-of-date extensions in Azure Data Studio: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 Luckily Azure Data Studio has a nice way to let us know if there is an extension that is out of date.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.
Comments closedAlan 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…
Comments closedDave 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.
Comments closedDave 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.
Comments closedAaron 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.
Comments closedI 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.
Comments closedAlan 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.
Comments closedDave Bland explains how we can get different tab colors in Azure Data Studio:
Have you ever been in an environment where you worked with both DEV\QA servers and Production servers? Of course you have, we all have. However, being in such an environment brings a certain level of risk. We all try to be very careful to run any code we are asked to run on the correct server and in the correct environment. Despite all of our checks and our Due diligence, we are still human and do make a mistake from time to time. Azure Data Studio has a nice feature that will allows us to change the color of tabs based on the environment the server is in. The image below is an example of what it would look like.
I really like this functionality because it gives you one additional warning that you’re about to run a dev script against a production server on accident.
Comments closedDave Bland walks us through the “Explain” button in Azure Data Studio:
At first I was thinking maybe it is a short cut to help. Nope, it is actually an easy way to get the estimated execution plan. The key is estimated execution plan. While in SQL Server Management Studio we have been able to easily get both the estimated or actual execution plan.
Just as a reminder, the actual execution plan requires the query to actually run. While the estimated plan will use statistics to generate the plan. Generally, if the actual and estimated are capture very close to each other, you are more than likely not going to see a difference between the tow.
Now let’s talk about the Explain button. It will return two things, the XML of the execution plan and a graphical representation of the execution plan.
There are a few differences between Azure Data Studio’s implementation of execution plans and SQL Server Management Studio’s.
Comments closed