Voice of the DBA

Tag: tools

Better Keyboard Extensions in Azure Data Studio

I used to use ALT+X to execute queries in SSMS. I spent years with this shortcut, but as I started to present more, CTRL+E felt more natural. I’ve now grown used to that, so when I typed CTRL+E in Azure Data Studio (ADS), I was less than pleased.

Even trying to get help here didn’t help.

I actually had a conversation with Kevin Cunnane when this was SOS and he pointed me to the keymap extension. You can get this by clicking the extensions icon on the left side of ADS:

Once you do this, search for keymap, and you’ll see Kevin’s extension.

You can see details for the extension on the right.

When you click “Install”, you’ll go to Kevin’s repo on Github. Click the link to download the VSIS extension. This gets saved in your Downloads folder (or wherever you have downloads going).

Go back to ADS and use the File menu to find the VSIS installer.

Browse and double click the VSIX file you downloaded. You’ll see a message in the lower right of ADS.

Click Yes, or no, but if you click No, this won’t install. In a few seconds, if you clicked Yes, you’ll see this:

Click Reload, and ADS will close and reopen. Your query window should still be there, and CTRL+E will pop the connection dialog, since the connection closed. Once you connect, the query will run with CTRL+E

The full list of key mappings is available on the repo or in the package.json file.

October 23, 2018
Installing Azure Data Studio

Azure Data Studio is the newest tool from Microsoft for working on the data platform. Last year we saw the preview release of this, called SQL Operations Studio. No one liked the name, and as the tools team at Microsoft worked to update the tool, they changed the name this year. At Ignite the rename and release was announced, and this is now a 1.x tool, available on Widows, OSX, and Linux.

If you search for Azure Data Studio, you should end up at this link:

The download link has a series of installed. You can choose installers for all the platforms, in a series of formats. I picked the Windows installer.

When you start the installer, you get a standard setup wizard. Here’s what you see, but these are all really next, next, next dialogs.

Running the Program

When you start Azure Data Studio, it opens with a large pane and a connection dialog. Before I can do anything, I need to connect.

I need to provide details, as expected, but I can optionally group my connections into a name. This is similar to the Registered Servers grouping I can do in SSMS. Here I’ve filled out some details, and given my connection a nickname for quick connections in the future.

Once I click Connect, I get a dashboard when ADS makes a connection. At a glance, I can see a few things. This is the “Manage” widget that Microsoft provides. You can make your own if you like.

There are some mappings for keyboards, and CTRL+N (of File | New Query) gets me a query window. Some basic intellisense is here.

It’s no SQL Prompt, which I miss when I use this tool.

CTRL+E doesn’t work, so I need to click the arrow to run the query. That’s OK, but it’s not ideal. Fortunately, there’s an extension to help here.

The results are slightly odd for me, since I’ve used SSMS for so long, but they work fine.

There is a column of icons on the left, the top of which is my list of server connections. If I click this, I see the list on the left side.

There’s lots more to do here, and you should experiment with this if you want a lightweight query tool. I’ll do a bit more work here, and see what I think, but I’m not sold on this for now as any sort of replacement for SSMS. I don’t know if MS will go that way, but for now, this still feels fairly bare bones.

October 19, 2018
SOS to ADS

When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio last year, I wasn’t thrilled. The move to a VS Code shell was less of a concern to me than having a better SSMS toolset. Actually, with VS moving to MacOS, I was hoping we’d get a slimmer, closer VS version of SSMS that allowed add-ins, extensions, and plugins.

No such luck. We got SQL Operations Studio, which had the unfortunate acronym of SOS. To top it off, I felt this was more of a developer tool, but the name implies a DBA/sysadmin tool. To me this was a tool somewhat lost in its mission.

Now we have Azure Data Studio, the renamed SOS, which is interesting. I know there are more features than SOS and some additional work coming, but I can’t get too excited. Other than people that want native connections to a server from OSX and Linux and write T-SQL, is this that useful?

You can download it and see what you think.

September 24, 2018
The Ideal IDE

When I started working with SQL Server, I spent a lot of time in Query Analyzer and isql.exe. Those were my two main tools, using those to query a database instance in a lightweight manner. At some point Microsoft released Enterprise Manager, which was more useful for some tasks, but overall, I preferred Query Analyzer. Eventually that died away, and we got stuck with Management Studio, which most of us now use. Along the way, I also used DBArtisan, RapidSQL, and a few other IDEs for writing code against a SQL Server.

These days we have a few choices for doing development and administration on the Microsoft data platform. There is still SSMS, but Visual Studio has gotten quite a few upgrades and extensions to allow work with everything from a local SQL Server to a cloud database to data lakes and more. Microsoft built a lightweight IDE in Visual Studio Code, and released a SQL Server extension for that tool. In the last year, we also saw a preview release of SQL Operations Studio (SOS) from Microsoft, and perhaps this is the direction that Microsoft is moving in the future. There are also other IDEs, such as DataGrip, that some people are using.

I’m still stuck in the the SSMS mode. Even when I use Visual Studio for SQL Server work, with something like SQL Change Automation, I often switch back to SSMS for lots of my work. I’ve done some work in SOS, but I don’t love the experience overall. Since I have SSMS running most of the time, the speed of SOS isn’t helpful. If I were shutting down and restarting SSMS often, I might feel differently.

Today I’m curious. I’m sure you all have preferences, but if you could choose only one IDE, what would it be? Let’s imagine that we’re not looking at the current state of the tools, but for whatever functionality you need, whether that’s database development tools, AG management tools, scheduling tools, etc., all of the functionality would be added to VS, VSCode, SSMS, SOS, DataGrip, etc. In that case, what do you prefer?

I think I’d lean towards keeping SSMS, though I wish it were more open and extensible. Since that’s not likely to happen, I think SOS might be my next choice as an IDE if it has lots of extensions, and I have the ability to enable or disable them for the functionality I need.

Steve Jones

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August 7, 2018