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Category: Azure Data Studio

Azure Data Studio April 2020 Release

Published 2020-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the April 2020 release of Azure Data Studio:

KQL magic extension support is now available in Azure Data Studio Notebooks. It allows you to connect, query and explore Azure Data Explorer (Kusto), ApplicationInsights and LogAnalytics data using kql (Kusto Query Language). If you are using Log Analytics today for your Azure SQL DB as described here, you can now do log metric analysis using KQL magic in Azure Data Studio Notebooks. 

KQL magic package can be downloaded from Manage Packages in Python Notebook or using pip install. In a Python Notebook in Azure Data Studio, load KQL magic using (%reload_ext Kqlmagic). Start connecting, querying, and exploring using %kql or %%kql for multi-lines.   

KQL magic allows you to see tabular results similar to SQL Notebook, where you can also have the benefits of exporting outputs to other formats (csv, Excel, JSON, XML) and using the Charting functionality. You can also take advantage of rendering charts directly with plotly for richer interactivity. 

There are several fairly big changes in here, so check them all out.

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Working with Jupyter Books in Azure Data Studio

Published 2020-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick takes us through using Jupyter Book in Azure Data Studio:

The first thing to know is that Jupyter Books and “Jupyter Book support” (in Azure Data Studio) are slightly different concepts. Jupyter Books let you build web-based collections of Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter Books support allows you to build collections of Jupyter notebooks on your local computer or network (ie. not web-based). Additionally, all of the standards and functionality of the online Jupyter Books may not be fully supported/implemented in Azure Data Studio.

Click through for what this means as well as what the March 2020 release brought us.

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Using Jupyter Notebooks in SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2020-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows us how to run an Azure Data Studio notebook as a SQL Agent job:

Azure Data Studio is a great tool for connecting with your data platform whether it is in Azure or on your hardware. Jupyter Notebooks are fantastic, you can have words, pictures, code and code results all saved in one document.

I have created a repository in my Github https://beard.media/Notebooks where I have stored a number of Jupyter notebooks both for Azure Data Studio and the new .NET interactive notebooks.

Another thing that you can do with notebooks is run them as Agent Jobs and save the results of the run.

Read on to learn how.

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Azure Data Studio March 2020 Release

Published 2020-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the March 2020 release of Azure Data Studio:

Now you can add visualizations using a T-SQL query. In addition, as the gif illustrates, you can also customize your visualization whether it is a scatter or time series graph.

You can also copy your visualization or save the image so that you can quickly add this in an email or report to other team members.

We will continue to bring improvements to charting over the next few months.

They’ve put a lot of time and effort into notebooks. They’re still missing some of the quality of life improvements I want to see before moving to them full-time, but they’re consistently getting better.

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Snapshot Creation in Azure Data Studio

Published 2020-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland checks out an extension to Azure Data Studio to manage snapshots:

Like many Azure Data Studio extensions, DB Snapshot Creator is designed to bring functionality into ADS that is not present by default.  This extension was developed by Sean Price. As the name suggests, this extension can be used to easily create database snapshots.  Before going too deep into this extension, let’s take a quick moment to go over what a snapshot is.

Back in the day, I created a WPF tool for a company to manage snapshots for manual testing: take a snapshot, perform whatever destructive testing you needed to do, and revert back to a known good state. In a world with good CI/CD tooling and Docker containers, that’s not nearly as important anymore, but sometimes you just need to run a quick test, so I’m glad the functionality is still around.

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T-SQL Checker ADS Extension

Published 2020-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Janik has a new Azure Data Studio extension for us:

I’ve created a sample ads extension that checks TSQL syntax in real-time for potential bad practice.

Right now the extension is using regex, which isn’t the best for parsing SQL but it works for the few test cases I’ve added.

I’m hoping that the community can help evolve the project into something really cool; so, I’m asking for your help in making that happen.

Click through for a demo, and check out the GitHub repo.

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Azure Data Studio February Release

Published 2020-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the February 2020 release of Azure Data Studio:

Azure Data Studio is a multi-database, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. To learn more, visit our Github.

The key highlights to cover this month include:

– Improved Azure sign in support.
– Find in Notebook support.
– Visual Studio Code merge to 1.42.
– Bug fixes.

Read on for more details on each topic.

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Updating the Powershell Kernel in Azure Data Studio Notebooks

Published 2020-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Pusateri has a two-parter on Powershell notebooks. First up is the problem:

PowerShell Notebooks are a great new feature in Azure Data Studio, first becoming available in the November 2019 release. Like SQL notebooks, PowerShell notebooks are based on Jupyter Notebooks format, which are interactive documents containing text and executable code blocks.

Having some working PowerShell code that I wanted to share along with explanations and examples, I created a PowerShell Notebook. The only problem was my functions would never initialize. Actually they would never stop initializing – I would run the cell they were defined in, and it would just keep running forever.

And then Bob has the solution:

It turns out I did not have the latest version of the PowerShell Kernel running on my machine. The latest version is currently 0.1.3, and I had 0.1.2. Upgrading appears to have solved this issue for me – yay!

This solution also raises the issue that there is no notification from Azure Data Studio that a PowerShell Kernel exists or is in need of updating. I (and probably others) will just believe that as long as Azure Data Studio is up to date, we’re good to go. So how does one update their PowerShell kernel? Well, it’s simple, but not intuitive.

Read on to see how.

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Creating a New Database in Azure Data Studio

Published 2020-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows how you can create a new database using Azure Data Studio:

Regardless of what tool we are using, SQL Server Management Studio or Azure Data Studio, the need to create new databases is always present. Using Transact SQL is an option in both tools.  What is not an option in both tools is to right click and to go “New Database”.  This has been in SSMS for many years, however it is NOT present in Azure Data Studio.

If you really do want to create a new database using a GUI in Azure Data Studio, Dave shows you the extension you need. It’s not as fully-featured as the wizard in Management Studio, so it would make sense to understand what that wizard is doing and learn the T-SQL yourself.

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