A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Alan Yu announces the April release of Azure Data Studio:
The key highlights to cover this month include:
– March release recap
– Azure Explorer improvements
– Visual Studio code merge process
– Insiders build process
– Viewlet revamp
– Notebook improvements
– Announcing SandDance extension
– Bug fixes
There’s a lot going on with the product, so grab the latest version and give it a try.
Comments closedSQL Server supports different kinds of authentication mechanisms and protocols: the older NTLM protocol, and Kerberos. A lot of people cringe when you mention Kerberos because, well, Kerberos is hard. It’s arcane, it’s complex, and it’s hard to even describe unless you use it on the regular.
Simply put, it’s a ticketing and key system: you, a user, requests a ticket from a store, usually by authenticating to it via a username and password. If you succeed, you get a ticket that get stored within your local machine. Then, when you want to access a resource (like a SQL Server), the client re-ups with the store you got your initial ticket from (to make sure it’s still valid), and you get a “key” to access the resource. That key is then forwarded onto the resource, allowing you to access the thing you were trying to connect to. It’s way, way more complex than this, with lots of complicated terms and moving parts, so I’m doing a lot of hand-waving, but that’s the core of the system. If that kind of stuff excites you, go Google it, and I promise you’ll get more than you ever bargained for.
Kerberos is a scary beast to me, mostly because I don’t spend enough time working directly with it.
Comments closedTo clarify, the extension in ADS is like XEvent Profiler in Management Studio (which also is built using Extended Events). The name “SQL Server Profiler” is confusing, as this is not the same tool (UI) that’s been available since SQL Server 7.0.
To install the extension, click on it, and then select Install. Once it’s installed you can select Reload and it will move into the top half of the window under Enabled. Notice that when you select the extension, information about how to use it also appears.
Erin has a lot of useful information here, so check it out.
Comments closedMohammad Darab shows how you can access a readable secondary using Azure Data Studio:
Recently, I had to use Azure Data Studio to access a application intent read only secondary replica. I had to use Azure Data Studio because I was using a Mac. I usually use SSMS on my Windows machines. If you want to connect with the “applicationintent=readonly” property via SQL Server Management Studio, you do so by typing it out in the “Additional Connection Parameters” as shown in the screenshot below:
Since I am fairly new to Azure Data Studio I was fumbling my way around to find the equivalent setting. And I finally found it…
Read on to see how you can set this in Azure Data Studio.
Comments closedFor presentations, it is fairly obvious what the use case is: you can prepare notebooks to show in your presentations, with code and results combined in a convenient way. It helps when you have to establish a workflow in your demos that the attendees can repeat at home when they download the demos for your presentation.
For troubleshooting scenarios, the interesting feature is the ability to include results inside a Notebook file, so that you can create an empty Notebook, send it to your client and make them run the queries and send it back to you with the results populated. For this particular usage scenario, the first thing that came to my mind is running the diagnostic queries by Glenn Berry in a Notebook
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Obviously , I don’t want to create such a Notebook manually by adding all the code cells one by one. Fortunately, PowerShell is my friend and can do the heavy lifting for me.
This type of scenario is one of the best ones I see for database administrators: consistent, documented troubleshooting guides. Oh, and you can save results off if you need to review them later. This has the potential to be a killer feature for Azure Data Studio.
Comments closedConstantine Kokkinos is excited about a big addition to Azure Data Studio:
I know I have been writing a lot about ADS recently, but this is even bigger than the Notebook announcement.
A Postgres plugin has been announced in the insider release of ADS, and it just works!
If the term Postgres is unfamiliar – PostgreSQL is one of the preeminent open source database solutions and is showing wide adoption due to its quality and of course, price.
Read on for additional notes.
Comments closedYou can create a custom keyboard shortcut in VS Code (And Azure Data Studio too) that gives you this functionality. Highlight code, press a button and execute that code in the active terminal, which just so happens to be SSH’d into a remote host.
Head over to Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts (Picture 1) and in there you’ll find a shortcut called “Terminal: Run Selected Text In Active Terminal” (Picture 2). This is exactly what I want. Now, when I’m presenting…I can highlight the code…and what I highlighted gets copied into the terminal below and executed on whatever system is active in the terminal below. This could be either my local computer or a remote system over SSH.
Anthony’s use case is specifically around presentations but it could also be good for general use.
Comments closedRob Sewell tries out Azure Data Studio’s SQL notebooks, currently in preview:
OK, so now that we have the dependencies installed we can create a notebook. I decided to use the ValidationResults database that I use for my dbachecks demos and describe here. I need to restore it from my local folder that I have mapped as a volume to my container. Of course, I use dbatools for this
Click through to see how to install and use SQL notebooks.
Comments closedConstantine Kokkinos takes us through the preview of T-SQL notebooks in Azure Data Studio:
I have been waiting for word about the new Notebook functionality in Azure Data Studio, and when I heard it was available in the insider build, I jumped in to take a look.
A Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to host programming languages, run code (often with different programming languages), return results, annotate your data, and importantly, share the source controlled results with your colleagues.
This is an exciting addition; SQL is a great language to combine with notebooks given the exploratory nature of the language. I’m going to wait until it’s officially out before diving too far into it, though.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey shows how easy it is to add an extension to Azure Data Studio:
If you’re even thinking about experimenting with, let alone actively using, Azure Data Studio, you need to plan on installing a few extensions. Buck Woody has a great list that you should look through in this blog post. If you’re just getting started with Azure Data Studio, I have an introduction here.
Depending on the extension, this could be a simple as a mouse click. However, not all the extensions are that easy. Let’s explore this just a little so when you do start using Azure Data Studio, things are easy.
You can reasonably install Management Studio and never think about adding extensions. Don’t do that with Azure Data Studio, though: a lot of the benefit comes from its extensibility. And Microsoft tends to add things as extensions before bringing them into the base product.
Comments closed