The June release of Azure Data Studio is now available
We’re excited to announce the June release of Azure Data Studio (formerly known as SQL Operations Studio) is now available.
Download Azure Data Studio and review the release notes to get started.
Note: After downloading Azure Data Studio, say Yes to enabling preview features so that you can use extensions.
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:
- Launch SSMS dialogs from Azure Data Studio
- Release of Central Management Servers (CMS) extension
- Schema Compare improvements
- Moved Messages section to its own tab
- Azure Data Studio separate Insiders build
- SQL Notebook improvements
- Visual Studio Code April Release Merge 1.34
- Bug fixes
For a list of complete updates, please refer to the release notes.
Launch SSMS dialogs from Azure Data Studio
For our Windows users, we want to make it even easier for you to use Azure Data Studio with SQL Server Management Studio. With this release, we’re making it possible to launch certain SSMS dialogs from Azure Data Studio. This gives you access to some of the most used experiences in SSMS without needing to context switch between tools.
To start, we have enabled this feature for:
This experience is available through the Database Administration Tool extension for Windows. You can start using this right away by downloading the extension from our Extensions marketplace. Note: This functionality only works on Windows.
Let us know what SSMS dialogs and wizards you want us to tackle next by submitting a feature request on GitHub.
On the flipside, with SSMS 18.0, users can already right-click on a server and open the server in Azure Data Studio as a new query window or new notebook and still pass along the connection. When users have Azure Data Studio installed, they can quickly start creating a SQL Notebook in the server they are already working with.
With CMS and better SSMS integration, we will continue to listen to your requests, so please continue to let us know what you would like to see in Azure Data Studio.
Central Management Servers (CMS) extension
As our team presented in SQL Server sessions across the country, users in person and on GitHub told us that they couldn’t start using Azure Data Studio in their daily work streams until X feature was implemented. One of the most requested of these features is Central Management Servers support, and we are excited to announce the preview release of the CMS extension.
For those unfamiliar with CMS, CMS servers store a list of instances of SQL Server that is organized into one or more central manager server groups. Users can connect to their own existing CMS server and manage their server by adding and removing servers.
Try out the CMS extension by downloading the extension from our Extensions marketplace.
Schema Compare improvements
Last month, we announced the preview release of the Schema Compare extension. This represents how we continue to bring developer experiences into Azure Data Studio.
One important feature was to add Exclude and Include options. By default, all schema differences are included in the scope of the Update Target action. We have now added the ability to exclude certain differences from the comparison to provide users more choice over schema changes. This is shown in the gif below:
Additional improvements include:
- Generate Script now opens the script after being generated
- Removed double scroll bars
- Formatting and layout improvements
- To see the full list of improvements, please view the list of closed issues on GitHub.
To learn more about the Schema Compare extension, view our documentation.
Try out Schema Compare by downloading the extension from our Extensions marketplace. Once you try out the extension, let us know what features you want us to prioritize by joining the discussion on our GitHub issue. We will continue to make investments in the Schema Compare extension such as .scmp file support, so stay tuned for future updates.
Moved Messages section to its own tab
Since we released Azure Data Studio, the Results panel and Messages panel were stacked on top of each other, and users told us they would prefer the UI real estate provided more room to view the full results or messages.
Due to this highly requested feature, we have moved Messages into its own tab on the same panel. Now, users can select between Results and Messages rather than viewing each on top of each other.
This behavior is similar to SQL Server Management Studio, and will give users more space to view their query results and possible error messages. Let us know on GitHub if you have any additional requests with this UI change.
Separate Insiders build
In the past few months, we have added features like Schema Compare, Central Management Servers, and other features in our Insiders build so that users can get a sneak peek of new features we are working on. We’re grateful to many of you who have been using our Insiders build and provided us feedback before we officially launched the feature into our stable monthly release.
To make it easier for anyone to try our Insiders build, we’ve added an Insiders tag to any build that is not from the stable monthly build of Azure Data Studio, as shown below:
This makes it easier for users to know which build is Insiders and which one is the stable build. Now that it is easier to differentiate between the builds, we encourage you try our Insiders builds to get early access to our preview features. You can download it by going to the Insiders Build section of GitHub (Insiders builds are below the table with our stable builds).
Notebook improvements
SQL Notebooks continues to be adopted by more and more users for demos, troubleshooting, education, and documentation. As we continue to bring new features in Notebooks, we’ve focused on quality and performance to make sure notebooks are a first-class experience for our users.
- Users can now choose to use their own Python 3 or Anaconda installs in notebooks
- Multiple stability and fit/finish fixes
- View the full list of improvements here
If you have not tried SQL Notebooks yet, get started by following along with our documentation.
Visual Studio Code April release merge 1.34
As mentioned in the March release blog, we are picking up changes from Visual Studio Code even faster. In the past, we were usually three updates behind, but the community has asked for getting Visual Studio Code features even faster. Your feedback was noted, so we now have improvements from the VS Code April release.
To view the full list of changes, check out the 1.34 release notes.
Bug fixes
If you would like to help continue making Azure Data Studio a great product, please share any feedback or report issues through our Issues page. Our engineering team regularly reviews the untriaged issues and assigns issues into different monthly milestones so that you know what we are working on it. Your votes on issues helps us prioritize.
A full list of bug fixes for the June release can be found here.
Contact us
If you have any feature requests or issues, please submit them to our GitHub issues page. For any questions, feel free to comment below or tweet us.
