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Category: Azure Data Studio

Reading From a Secondary with Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad 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.

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Building a DMV Diagnostic Queries Notebook

Published 2019-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori shows how you can use dbatools and Powershell to build a Jupyter notebook in Azure Data Studio for Glenn Berry’s DMV scripts:

For 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.

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.

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Postgres Support in Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine 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.

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Sending Highlighted Code From VS Code Via SSH

Published 2019-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino shows how you can use Visual Studio Code to highlight and then send code via SSH to a remote machine:

You 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.

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Diving Into SQL Notebooks

Published 2019-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rob 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.

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Azure Data Studio and T-SQL Notebooks

Published 2019-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine 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.

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Azure Data Studio: Extension Installation

Published 2019-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Grant 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.

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Wait Stats In Azure Data Studio

Published 2019-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal takes the Wait Stats Report in Azure Data Studio for a spin:

Note that the x-axis is percentage of all waits, not wait count. You’ll see that PREEMPTIVE_OS_FLUSHFILEBUFFERS is the top wait on my Linux instance – that’s by design and I’ll blog about that next. I’ve also submitted a GitHub change to add that wait to the list of waits filtered out by script the extension uses.

Anyway, you can drill in to the details by clicking the ellipsis at the top-right of the graph and selecting ‘Show Details’. That’ll give all the waits and by selecting each one you can see the usual output from my waits script. To get more information on what each wait means, select the bottom cell, right-click on the URL to copy it, and paste into your favorite browser to go to my waits library. And of course, you can refresh the results via the ellipsis as well.

I like how Azure Data Studio is coming together as a full product. There’s a ways to go yet, but it’s getting there.

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Formatting with RegEx in SQL Server

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill has a problem:

This is a contrived example but I was given a script that got the “Discipline”, “DocumentVersion”, “DocumentNumber”, “SectionNumber”, and “SectionName” out of the above.

And while it works, I hate that formatting. Everything is all squashed and shoved together.

No, thanks. Let’s see if we can make this more presentable.

Shane has a regular expression. Now Shane has two problems.

In all seriousness, regular expressions are extremely powerful in the right scenario. Shane mentions being okay with it not in the database engine and I’m usually alright with that, but there are cases when it’s really helpful like figuring out if a particular input is valid. One example I have on a project is finding legitimate codes (like ISBN) where you can solve the problem easily with a regex but my source data is abysmal. I can use the SQL# regular expression functions to drop into CLR and figure out whether that value is any good, something I would have a lot more trouble with in T-SQL alone.

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Azure Data Studio Code Snippets

Published 2019-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Brenner shows us how we can create code snippets in Azure Data Studio:

A great thing about these snippets is that you can add your own and they can be exactly how you want them.

To get started with this open the Command Pallet with Ctrl+Shift+P and type in ‘snippets’.

Scroll down and find the SQL option. Open it and it will bring you to the SQL.json file in which we’ll be storing our SQL Snippets.

I had to migrate a bunch of SSMS snippets to Azure Data Studio and was not that happy with the experience, especially for some of the more complicated snippets.

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