Category: Azure Data Studio

Alan Yu announces the latest release of SQL Operations Studio:

Highlights for this build include the following.

• Announcing Redgate SQL Search extension available in Extension Manager

• Community Localization available for 10 languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese!

• GDPR-compliant build has reduced telemetry collection, improved opt-out experience and in-product links to Privacy Statement

• Extension Manager has improved Marketplace experience to easily discover community extensions

• SQL Agent extension Jobs and Job History view improvement

• Updates for whoisactive and Server Reports extensions

• Fix GitHub Issues

Click through for more details and be sure to grab the latest update.

Alan Yu announces the April release of SQL Operations Studio:

Highlights for this build include the following.

• Public preview release of SQL Agent extension

• Added new extensions and improved existing extensions

  • Improvements to Server Reports Extension
  • Release of SSMS Keymap extension
  • Release of AlwaysOn Insights extension
  • Release of MSSQL Instance Insights
  • Release of MSSQL Db Insights

• Added Visual Studio Code 1.21 platform source code refresh

  • Improved large and protected file support for saving Admin protected and >256M files within SQL Ops Studio
  • Integrated Terminal splitting to work with multiple open terminals at once
  • Reduced installation on-disk file count footprint for faster installs and startup times

• Continue to fix GitHub issues

There’s a lot in here.

Prashanth Jayaram shows how to build a custom widget in SQL Operations Studio, using database growth metrics as an example:

In this article, you will learn the following:

• Introduction to SQL Operations Studio

• How to run a custom SQL query and view it as a chart

• How to use default and custom widgets

• Various panes and options in SSOS

• Explain the different chart options

• Create a custom insight

• Details to define a custom widget step by step

• And more…

Building these dashboard widgets is pretty easy, and Prashanth shows it step by step.

Alan Yu announces a new version of SQL Operations Studio:

Take a moment to breathe, this is a loaded update.

The March Public Preview release is focused on improving our Extensibility story and continuing to address top GitHub issues. This includes enabling Extension Manager, improving the Manage Dashboard experience and providing a couple Insights extensions. Please see the following details.

• Enhance the Manage Dashboard extensibility model to support tabbed Insights and Configuration panes

• Dashboard Insights extensions for sp_whoisactive from whoisactive.com and a Server Reports example

• Extension Manager enables simple acquisition of 1st-party and 3rd-party extensions

• Add additional Extensibility APIs for connection and objectexplorer management

• Community Localization open for 10 languages

• Continue to fix important customer impacting GitHub issues

There’s some nice stuff in this release, but the big story is around extensibility.

Drew Furgiuele is building a bridge to nowhere in SQL Operations Studio:

So when I sat down to write noWHERE, the concept seemed simple enough: I’ll code some text parsing into extension.js to look at the editor window’s text and look for UPDATE and DELETE statements and then try to see if there’s a missing WHERE clause. Seems reasonable enough, right? Except writing a SQL parser isn’t really something I want to do (or would be ABLE to do, frankly).

Since the module is written in JavaScript, I can leverage node.js modules to do most of the work for me. In this case, I downloaded a module called sqlite-parser. It’s a barebones, no-frills SQL syntax parser. It doesn’t support any dialect-specific stuff for T-SQL, but for this initial project, I only really care about ANSI UPDATE and DELETE statements.

There’s also a T-SQL parser available via Powershell, though I suppose that one isn’t directly available within SqlOps.  One thing that would make this really good would be to intercept the execute operation and pop up a warning dialog if there’s no WHERE clause.  There are some third-party tools which do this for Management Studio and a gate like that really saves you in the event of an emergency.

Ahmad Yaseen demonstrates how to configure SQL Operations Studio as well as writing queries with it:

To customize your connection, click the Advanced button that provides a large number of options that can help you to draw a specific type of connection. For example, you can specify the application workload type when connecting to the server by setting the Application Intent option. You can also override the default Connect Timeout setting, the SQL Server Current Language, the default Column Encryption Setting for all commands on the connection, the Encrypt option to use the SSL encryption for all data sent between the client and the server if there is an installed certificate, Persist Security Info to prevent returning the password as a part of the connection, and use the SSL encryption although there is no certificate in the server by enabling the Trust Server Certificate.

You can also use the Advanced options to specify the number of attempts to restore connection and the delay between attempts using Connect Retry Count and Connect Retry Interval. In addition, you will be able also to specify the maximum and the minimum number of connections allowed in the pool with the ability to force that the connection object is drawn from the appropriate pool, and the minimum amount of time for that connection to live in the pool using Load Balance Timeout. The Failover Partner option allows you to provide the name of the SQL Server instance that acts as a failover partner. You can control the size of the network packets used to communicate with the SQL Server instance using the Packet Size option.

It’s interesting to see just how much you can configure in the tool.

Alan Yu announces the February release of SQL Operations Studio:

The February release includes several major repo updates and feature releases, including:

• Added Auto-Update Installation feature
• Added Connection Dialog ‘Database’ Drop-down
• Added functionality for new query tabs keeping active connection
• Fixed bugs in SQL Editor and auto-completion

For complete updates, refer to the Release Notes.

Auto-update, something that Management Studio and Power BI don’t do.

Alan Yu announces a new release of SQL Operations Studio:

The January release includes several major repo updates and feature releases, including:

• Enable the HotExit feature to automatically reopen unsaved files.

• Add the ability to access saved connections from Connection Dialog.

• Set the SQL editor tab color to match the Server Group color.

• Fix the broken Run Current Query command.

• Fix the broken pinned Windows Start Menu icon.

Click through for the download link.

Samir Behara shows how to differentiate environments with custom tab colors:

The initial January release insiders build focuses on bug fixes and minor feature improvements. One thing which caught my attention was the ‘SQL Editor Tab Color‘ to differentiate between query tabs inside the IDE.

Using Custom Color to differentiate between environments is one of my favorite feature inside SQL Server Management Studio. The color is displayed in the SSMS status bar, at the bottom. Hence when you connect with a particular environment, it uses the same assigned color. This presents a visual indication of the environment in which you are running your scripts. Lot of 3rd Party tools from RedGate and ApexSQL also has their own versions of setting different colors while connecting to different environments.

Using environment-specific color schemes can be a life-saver.