I don’t know how many of you will be disappointed or impacted by this, but Azure Data Studio (ADS) is being retired, as of 6 Feb, 2025. It will be supported for a little over a year, until 28 Feb, 2026. On one hand I’m not surprised, and on the other, I’m a little shocked by this.
I have written a number of articles on ADS, and shown how things work, as well as pointed out a number of things that don’t work well in the product or its extensions. These pieces have gotten a number of reads, and people have commented on them, so I wonder if there are a lot of you that are upset by this. Is this going to change the way you work? I will say that it will lightly change my work, as I do use ADS to connect to PostgreSQL, but not so much for SQL Server.
I have tried to use ADS, but I just don’t like it. I don’t have a good reason, as it does a lot of what I need from a query tool. I think the port of the query and result experience from a real app like SSMS or Enterprise Manager or even isql/w is just a worse experience. I don’t like the ADS interface and it’s annoying to me.
I suspect that many others feel the same way (other views from Deb and Kevin). They don’t like the ADS experience and prefer SSMS or some other tool. I know there’s been no shortage of complaints over the years about, and finally MS has listened. From first trying to get everyone to leave SSMS to forcing people to install ADS alongside SSMS and now to finally retiring the tool. I think it’s a good decision as people don’t want to lose SSMS and it’s hard to maintain two tools.
We will still have VS Code, which I use often for other purposes. I haven’t spent much time with the mssql extension, but I need to as it’s been updated as of a few months ago and supposedly works better now. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I won’t mourn ADS. It was a tool that had potential. I liked the idea of notebooks, I liked the fast startup. I just wish it were better implemented as a run-a-query-and-get-results application. I wish we had a cross platform editor that was simple and fast, but not one based on VSCode. One that’s written to just manage queries. Maybe they’ll rewrite isql/w in a modern way and port it to Linux.
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What exactly was the pointy of ADS? Was MS really trying to make it the replacement for SSMS? I used ADS a little, when we first were using Azure but like you I don’t care for it’s interface/design. I can see now rational reason for trying to replace SSMS. Update it yes but replace it? not at all.
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I think it was to a) get a x-plat tool as there are people running MacOS (mostly) and Linux (few) that wanted a tool to manage their servers. I think they hoped they could abandon SSMS as well, but that didn’t work.
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So maybe this is a dumb Q but if they wanted a cross platform take on SSMS why make something so different looking versus re-creating SSMS but in a way to allows for cross platform use?
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Strictly my opinion: They didn’t want to spend significant resources on anything.
ADS built on a lot of VS Code work. Since that was very popular, they decided to use that as a basis, which makes some sense. I think they didn’t quite execute on it well and didn’t get a good enough experience to get devs/dbas to want to use it. When I look closely, I’m like, it does a lot of stuff I want and it’s fast. However, when I use it, I’m a bit annoyed.
In terms of SSMS, it’s a big fat mess, built on the VS 2015(?) shell. IT’s got years of bad development and it’s a legacy monolith. Re-creating that in VS2017/2019 is a huge piece of work for a free thing, and I suspect they didn’t want to build on those as VSMacOS was retired and abandoned. So, not a good place to develop. There likely isn’t appetite to build a MacOS native thing as there isn’t significant Mac users, same for Linux, but there are some. So VSCode as a base makes sense.
It just didn’t work.
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Personally, I’m not sad to see ADS be “retired”. I am a little surprised, because Microsoft was quite persistent in boosting and pushing ADS for several years, despite quite a bit of resistance.
The decision to automatically install ADS from the SSMS installer was very unpopular, yet Microsoft was pretty stubborn about it despite the widespread complaints. “This is for your own good…”
It was also pretty obvious that SSMS was being neglected in favor of ADS as far as Development resources. That has changed, which is a good thing.
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Hope this means more SSMS dev work. I also wish they’d get a Linux or MacOS port of SSMS somehow. At least some of it.
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I’m going to sorely miss ADS. As a Linux home user, ADS is my preferred tool for SQL Server, and SQL Operations Studio (SOS) as it was known when it first came out was badged a the SSMS for non-Windows users.
Admittedly it had a bad start; feature lacking and marketed poorly/incorrectly in my opinion. Now it’s quite feature full (it has some features SSMS lacks), and the familiarity it has with VSCode (which it is a fork of) is nice.
The MSSQL extension for VSCode was always lacking, especially compared to ADS, so I haven’t used it in a long time; I did see several questions from people using it that asked how to achieve something and couldn’t (but it was available in both ADS and SSMS).
Maybe the VSCode experience will get a lot better to be on parity with ADS; I hope it does. If not, then I will honestly have to hope that someone more competent that I makes a good fork of ADS and supports it into the future. I’m certainly not going anywhere near DBeaver…
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I think if you’re a non-Windows person, this isn’t great. The MSSQL extension was updated, and supposedly is better. I’ll review it soon.
I tried to use ADS, but it never took. Even when I ran MacOS, I kept a Windows VM mainly for MSSQL and SSMS. These days I’d likely just have one for SSMS and run a container for MSSQL
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