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Category: Azure Data Studio

Azure Data Studio November Update

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin and Erin Stellato have an update for us:

In this release of Azure Data Studio, we have exciting news to share across several of our core features and extensions. The first is the announcement of the general availability of Table Designer and Query Plan Viewer. We would like to extend a huge thank you to our engineering teams who have worked tirelessly over the past few months on improvements to these features. We would also like to thank the MVPs and community members who provided feedback on these features. We are grateful for continued engagement from users as we work to make Azure Data Studio the tool of choice for cloud database management across multiple platforms.

There’s a lot in this release, so check out the full changelog.

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Creating a SQL Server Assessment Dashboard

Published 2022-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Blackburn builds a dashboard:

We must periodically evaluate the state of our databases. Luckily for SQL Server, Microsoft provides us with a customizable assessment through their SQL Assessment API Repo and API Documentation. You can change the rules per database and output the results to a database to track history.

However, that will take more than an hour. Let’s create a dashboard with the default rules in under an hour. We will use Azure Data Studio (ADS) and Power BI Desktop (PBI). If you are not familiar with them, both are free. Azure Data Studio is automatically installed with SSMS 18.7 and higher. You can also install them individually.

Read on to see how this works. Granted, it will not auto-update but unless the assessment output format changes between runs, at least you wouldn’t need to modify Power BI and could just refresh the data.

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Deploying an Arc-Enabled SQL Managed Instance

Published 2022-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-enabled data services:

Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled Data Controller configured and available, we can now deploy our first Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance into our environment. As previously mentioned depending on the type of configuration required for your environment with your Arc-enabled Data Controller (Directly connected or Indirectly connected modes) this will dictate the approach available for you to setup / configure your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

Click through for a step-by-step guide.

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Azure Data Studio August 2022 Updates

Published 2022-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin has another month’s worth of updates for us:

The SQL Database Projects Publish dialog has been enhanced with a breadth of options including excluding object types, data definition language (DDL) trigger behavior, index rebuild behavior, and more. These options are available after clicking the Advanced button and a description for each option appears at the bottom of the panel. With the availability of these options, you can now publish a SQL project or generate the publish script with more precision for the requirements unique to your environment.

This is something I’ve missed from VSCode / Azure Data Studio that I could do 15 years ago in Visual Studio.

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Azure Data Studio July 2022 Release

Published 2022-07-28 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin announces a new set of updates:

The Query Plan Viewer feature continues to add functionality with this release of Azure Data Studio. There are several UX improvements users may notice: the icon to enable the capture of an actual plan has been updated, operator selection is now noted with a solid green line, and the plan labels are updated in the Properties window when plans are compared and the orientation is toggled from horizontal to vertical, and back.  We have updated the Command Palette to make it easier to find the commands for execution plans, and while the CTRL + M command still enables actual plan capture for a query window, it no longer executes the selected query (or queries) in the window. 

It’s not a huge release in terms of new functionality but there are some improvements to the query plan viewer and its core Visual Studio Code implementation.

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Building Custom Widgets for Azure Data Studio

Published 2022-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Esat Erkec builds a widget:

One of the most advantageous features of ADS is that it allows the creation of customized widgets. With the help of the widgets, we can easily visualize the result of the queries using different graph types. In this context, building the performance monitoring widgets can be a reasonable approach so that we can track the performance metrics readily. Now, let’s learn how to build a custom widget with a very straightforward example.

I haven’t tried this before in Azure Data Studio but I can see the benefit, especially if you have a common set of queries you intend to run to observe the status of a given server.

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Microsoft.Build.Sql for Database Projects

Published 2022-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces a new way of handling database projects:

Declarative development creates an environment where developers can focus on creating database objects while relying on the support of tooling locally and and in deployment pipelines to manage applying the differential changes calculated on the current state of the target database. Developers create objects such as tables or stored procedures by writing their definition with CREATE statements in scripts that live in source control just as if it is source code for any component of an application. Existing functionality for SQL projects in Visual Studio, Azure Data Studio, and VS Code provides developers with declarative development capabilities, however the existing SQL project file format has a few limitations.  With Microsoft.Build.Sql and SDK-style SQL projects, we look forward to unlocking new scenarios for your development practices.

It does sound interesting.

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Azure Data Studio April 2022 Updates

Published 2022-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin has some release notes for us:

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio. Among many other capabilities, this extension can be used for migrating SQL Server databases to Azure for an enhanced user experience. With this extension, users can get right-sized Azure recommendations based on performance data collected from your source SQL Server databases to optimize for cost and scale. The migration experience is powered by the Azure Database Migration Service which provides a scalable, resilient, and secure way to meet the needs of your organization. See below for a snapshot UI of this extension.

Click through for more notes on Azure SQL migration, the table designer, and more.

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Azure Data Studio Execution Plans

Published 2022-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis is happy (for now):

But I am not writing this post to moan about past issues. I am writing this post because Microsoft has made huge improvements to execution plan support in ADS. These are officially still in preview, but they are already available. However, you will need to take a few steps to see these improvements in action.

Read on to see what you need to do and to get Hugo’s initial thoughts.

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Query Plans in Azure Data Studio

Published 2022-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey is excited:

I have long been a fan of Azure Data Studio, but one shortcoming has kept me from truly adopting it: Query Plans in Azure Data Studio. Sure, there was a plug-in you could install. Also, you could use a somewhat truncated version of Plan Explorer, but all I wanted was for SQL Server Management Studio plans to be query plans in Azure Data Studio.

Go and get version 1.35 of the tool. Right now.

I think there’s still a fair amount of work to do on those plans but it’s a far cry from where they were prior to this.

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