I have been a big fan of SQL Ops Studio since its initial announcement during the PASS Summit 2017 and have been actively using it for my day to day development purpose.
Built on top of VS Code, this new data management tool is light weight, cross platform and highly customizable. SQL Ops Studio being a free and independent installer is getting lot of love from the SQL Server Developer Community as well.

Couple of days back, the SQL Operations Studio Team announced the February Public Preview Release —

You can download it here and get started browsing the new released features —
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-operations-studio/download

Since the initial release of SQL Ops Studio in November 2017, there has been monthly updates comprising of enhancements, new features and bug fixes. The tool is open sourced and the codebase is in GitHub and has been receiving lot of feedback from the Community. This has been a big step in ensuring that the tool provides a superlative user experience and actually caters to the requirements and use cases of the user community. But how do you know when a new version of SQL Ops Studio is released?

Until now this process was manual. Once the monthly preview is released you had to download and install the tool again. But things have changed for the good in the Feb Release.

Automatic Check for Updates

SQL Ops Studio now has a built in notification system to alert users when there are updates for new releases. Whenever you start SQL Ops Studio, it automatically checks for updates and pops up a toast notification to the user on the gear icon on the bottom left informing that an update is required.

In case you miss the notification you also have the option to manually check for updates. In Mac, you can find this option from the sqlops menu by selecting “Check for Updates” —

Conclusion —
With monthly releases in place for SQL Ops Studio, the automatic check for updates is a very helpful feature to ensure that users are notified and informed about the update schedule. 

I do wish that all the tools being released have this basic functionality right from the 1st public preview. The same thing happened with SQL Server Management Studio 2016, where in it was only after 5-6 months that the Automatic Check for Updates feature was incorporated.

If you have any feature request or suggestions to make the tool better, please pass on to the SQL Ops Team by creating an issue in Github.

You can read about the February release of SQL Operations Studio here. You can catch my other blogs about this tool here —

Microsoft SQL Operations Studio

Getting started with Microsoft SQL Operations Studio

Microsoft SQL Operations Studio – Color Themes and Customization

SQL Operations Studio – Improvements to Connection Dialog

SQL Operations Studio – Using Custom Color to differentiate between environments

Categories: Azure Data Studio, SQL Server