Today Microsoft announced the Public Preview of their free lightweight cross platform tool called as ‘SQL Operations Studio‘. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. There was already a lot of excitement about this tool in the community after it was announced during the PASS Summit by Rohan Kumar.

Without any delay, I installed the SQL Operations Studio Preview for Windows from the link here – Download and install Microsoft SQL Operations Studio (preview)

The code base of the tool is open sourced and is in GitHub. Community folks can directly contribute to the code base and help in fixing issues –https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio

The first look of the tool looks pretty impressive to me. Few things which looked different and new to me when compared to SQL Server Management Studio —

Using Code Snippets by typing ‘sql’ in the Query Editor 

Peek Definition Feature –  familiar to folks working in Visual Studio IDE

‘Search Widget’ inside your Database Dashboard lets you quickly find your db objects.

Exporting query results to CSV, Excel and JSON

Customizable Database Dashboard

Github Source Control Integration with Ops Studio

Reporting Issues

There is complete transparency on the process of sending feedback and reporting bug/suggestions —  https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues

I noticed few issues while using the tool and reported it to the OpsStudio Team. Must admit they have been busy today looking at all the feedback from the community.

Not able to execute a query against multiple connections using ‘New Server Group’  —  https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues/28

‘Server Name’ and ‘Database Name’ – Can these be drop downs instead of text boxes?  — https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues/22

Execute Stored Procedure Option is missing  —   https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues/16

There are tutorials and documentation provided by Microsoft to assist you in learning the tool. I would highly recommend you to go through these links to gather more information on SQLOpsStudio —

What is Microsoft SQL Operations Studio (preview)?

Quickstart: Connect and query SQL Server using SQL Operations Studio (preview)

Tutorial: Use the Transact-SQL editor to create database objects – SQL Operations Studio (preview)

You can also follow SQL Ops Studio in Twitter — @sqlopsstudio

Overall I enjoyed playing around with this tool and liked the first look. I hope to discover more of its capabilities tomorrow and will write another blog post about my user experience. There has been a number of Bugs and Suggestions already identified by the community and hopefully this tool will only become better with its future releases.

Categories: Azure Data Studio, SQL Server, SQL Server 2017