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SQL Operations Studio – Improvements to Connection Dialog

By Samir Behara on January 8, 2018 • ( 2 )

SQL Operations Studio is the new cross platform tool from Microsoft which can run on Windows, MacOS or Linux and allow you to connect to your database instance. It is free, lightweight and extremely customizable – since it is built on top of Visual Studio Code.

The SQL Operations Studio Team has been keeping themselves busy since the Public Preview of this tool on November 15th. Based on the feedback from the Community, they have doing bug fixes, incorporating suggestions and working on new features. There were a bunch of bug fixes and features released with the monthly release on 19th December. Hardly 2 weeks later, there is already an initial January release insiders build – primarily focusing on bug fixing and minor feature improvements.

Based on the tweet from Kevin Cunnane I downloaded the January Preview version to explore the new functionalities –

Help us test the January insiders build for #sqlopsstudio – available at https://t.co/9DqovqY4hs. We'll be making additional fixes as needed but the main improvements (Hot Exit and Tab Colorization) are there to try out before the official release later this month

— Kevin Cunnane (@kevcunnane) January 4, 2018

Back in November, I had opened an issue in GitHub for SQLOps Studio Team to make the ‘Server Name’ and ‘Database Name’ as drop downs instead on text boxes, when you are adding a new connection. It will be awesome to have the ‘Database Name’ drop down auto populated once you mention the ‘Server Name’.

https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues/22#issuecomment-353198924

On the similar lines — In the January Release, there is an improvement to the Connection Dialog. When you try to connect to a database server, you get an option to select a ‘Server Group’. Personally even though it is an additional selection option, before clicking on the ‘Connect’ button – it is a welcome move. As developers/DBAs, you might be working with a number of servers/databases – hence it is a nice idea to keep your server/database connections organized.

In the January Release, there is a new tab called as ‘Saved Connections‘ – which displays the list of saved server connections you have. This is a nice add-on to the Connection window and will give incentive to the user to be organized inside the SQLOps Studio interface by leveraging the ‘Server Group’ feature. Once you have this in place, you will just be able to navigate to the ‘Saved Connections’ tab and connect to your database within no time.

In SQL Server Management Studio, the Server Name is a dropdown field – however in SQL Ops Studio there is no need of the same. You can leverage either the ‘Recent Connections’ to ‘Saved Connections’ tab to select the required Server Name and get connected to it.

Saved Connections

‘Servers’ tab also show the same list of database servers which you have earlier saved.

Connection Servers

So here goes another nice feature built into this tool. I am still awaiting my Connect issue to be actionized. It will be nice to have the ‘Database Name’ populated based on the ‘Server Name’.

SQL Operations Studio