Category: Azure Data Studio

Alan Yu announces the October release of Azure Data Studio:

As announced at Microsoft Ignite, one of the most exciting extensions to share in our September GA release was the release of the SQL Server 2019 Preview extension. If you were following the blog announcements, starting with SQL Server 2019 preview, SQL Server big data clusters allow you to deploy scalable clusters of SQL Server, Spark, and HDFS Docker containers running on Kubernetes.

These components are running side by side to enable you to read, write, and process big data from Transact-SQL or Spark. SQL Server big data clusters allow you to easily combine and analyze your high-value relational data with high-volume big data. To learn about all the excitement of SQL Server Big Data Clusters, follow the documentation here.

These experiences are built as an extension to Azure Data Studio. We can go into full depth about all the great capabilities this extension includes, but deep-diving into any one of these features can be a full blog post itself. Here is a high-level summary of these features, and then you can see a full demo of the features below.

There’s plenty more in here as well.

David Hiltenbrand notes a name change:

Will SQL Operations Studio upgrade automatically to Azure Data Studio? 

NO! Although they’re effectively the same thing currently, you do need to install Azure Data Studio separately from your existing sqlops install. You can install the new Azure Data Studio after downloading it from here: https://aka.ms/getazuredatastudio. The docs also include a helpful section, Move User Settings, that will help you migrate any custom settings you don’t want to lose from your sqlops configuration.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the name change.  But Grant Fritchey clues us in on the reason behind it:

The core concept here is to have a development tool that gives you a common framework for working with data, not just SQL data, but CosmosDB and others. Further, a tool that you can run where you work. Do you have a Mac? Cool. Use Azure Data Studio. Running Linux? Cool. Use Azure Data Studio. Still on Windows with me? We also get Azure Data Studio.

I do get the benefit of a tool which can hit different data sources, including something which is not SQL-based.  But the “Azure” in the name throws me.  I’ll still connect to my on-prem and AWS-based SQL Servers with it though.

Alan Yu announces a new release of SQL Operations Studio:

SQL Operations Studio was announced for Public Preview on November 15th at Connect(), and this August release is the ninth major update since the announcement. If you missed it, the July release announcement is available here.

Highlights for this release include the following.

• Announcing the SQL Server Import extension

• SQL Server Profiler Session management

• New community extension: First responder kit

• Quality of Life improvements: Connection strings

• Bug bash galore

That’s a nice set of improvements this month.

Jay Robinson shows how you can configure SQL Operations Studio to run Powershell with the click of two buttons:

As I’ve used SQL Operations Studio more and more, I’ve also been finally using PowerShell in more situations. Given that I like the editor and that there’s a built-in terminal, I’ve been running those in my Ops Studio instance. But for a while I didn’t have a slick way of running an entire PowerShell file in the terminal. Usually, I’d just Ctrl+A/Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, which is a bit awkward.

But among all the other ways you can customize Ops Studio, you have a lot of control over the key mappings. One way to edit these mappings is to pull up the Command Pallette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and start typing “key”, and you’ll see “Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts”. You’ll also see it mentions the Ctrl+K/Ctrl+S shortcut. This will bring you to the basic Keyboard Shortcuts window, where you’ll need to click “keybindings.json”. Either way, just like Ops Studio’s overall settings (and VSCode’s, for that matter), you get a JSON file you can now tweak. Actually, two of them, with the defaults on the left and your own settings on the right.

Read on to see Jay’s mapping and an explanation of what he’s doing.

Kendra Little gave a quiz on SQL Operations Studio and is now sharing the answers:

Question 2: To toggle a BLOCK comment, the built-in shortcut is…

Answer: Shift+Alt+A

• Correct: 43 (27%)
• Incorrect: 118 (73%)

I think a lot of folks who use SSMS regularly and don’t use VSCode may not know what I meant by the question, because SSMS doesn’t have this functionality (or if it does, I’ve never figured out the shortcut!)

Check out all of the answers and build up those SQLOps skills.

Kendra Little shows how you can change the code highlight color in SQL Operations Studio:

One of my major uses of SQL Ops studio will be demonstrating code in webcasts and videos, so it’s important to me to be able to set a high-contrast highlight for lines of code.

SQL Ops Studio is based on VSCode, which is very flexible, so I suspected there was a way to do this already. Also, there is a lot of documentation out there on VSCode already, so I searched on “VSCode change highlight color” to help find my way to the solution.

But I figured that lots of folks starting out with SQL Ops Studio may not know that, and that this post might be a good introduction to how to change things like this – as well as how to find things by searching for “vscode”!

Good info.

Alan Yu announces the June release of SQL Operations Studio:

The June public preview release is focused on improving our Extensibility experience with the release of new extensions as well as addressing top GitHub issues.

Highlights for this build include the following.

• SQL Server Profiler for SQL Operations Studio Preview extension initial release

• Azure SQL Data Warehouse extension

• Edit Data Filtering and Sorting

• SQL Server Agent for SQL Operations Studio Preview extension enhancements for Jobs and Job History views

• Build your own SQL Ops Studio extension

• Visual Studio Code Refresh

• Fix GitHub Issues

I saw “SQL Server Profiler” and started wondering what was going on, until Alan explained that it’s actually the lightweight Extended Events profiler and not the heavyweight beast we know and love and/or hate.