Azure Data Studio FAQ

Azure Data Studio is an open source, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the Azure Data family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Previously released under the preview name SQL Operations Studio, Azure Data Studio offers a modern editor experience with lightning fast IntelliSense, code snippets, source control integration, and an integrated terminal. It's engineered with the data platform user in mind, with built-in charting of query result sets and customizable dashboards.

Research has shown that users spend an order of magnitude more time working on query editing than on any other task with SQL Server Management Studio. For that reason, Azure Data Studio has been designed to focus deeply on the functionality that is used the most, with additional experiences made available as optional extensions into the product. Every user is allowed to customize their environment to the workflows that they use most often.

Azure Data Studio is free for private or commercial use.

Anyone can use Azure Data Studio. However, it's designed to simplify tasks performed by database developers, database administrators, system administrators, and independent software vendors.

Azure Data Studio is built on top of Visual Studio Code and offers a lightweight, keyboard focused modern code workflow experience when working with SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Data Studio makes the core experiences that you rely on every day simple and easy with built-in features such as multiple tab windows, a rich SQL editor, IntelliSense, keyword completion, code snippets & code navigation and source control integration (Git and TFS)). You can execute on-demand queries, view & save results as text, JSON, or Excel, edit data, organize & manage your favorite database connections, and browse database objects in a familiar object browsing experience.

Use your favorite command-line tools (for example, Bash, PowerShell, sqlcmd, bcp, psql, and ssh) in the Integrated Terminal window right within the Azure Data Studio user interface. Easily generate and execute CREATE and INSERT scripts for your database objects to create copies of your database for development or testing purposes. Boost your productivity with smart code snippets and rich graphical experiences that create new databases and database objects (such as tables, views, stored procedures, users, logins, roles, etc.) or update existing database objects. Use rich customizable dashboards to monitor and quickly troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in your databases on-premises, in Azure or any cloud.

Azure Data Studio offers a consistent experience to back up and restore your databases. With planned support for SQL Server Always-On Availability Groups, you can easily configure, monitor, and troubleshoot AGs for your mission-critical SQL Server databases and quickly failover to a secondary database during a disaster. Azure Data Studio has been designed to make you more productive in the DevOps lifecycle of your databases of choice on the operating systems of your choice. As a result, you're always in control, and you can reduce risks, solve problems faster, and continuously deliver value that exceeds customers' expectations.

The source code for Azure Data Studio and its data providers is available on GitHub. The source code for the front-end Azure Data Studio (which is based on Visual Studio Code) is available under a source code EULA that provides rights to modify and use the software, but not to redistribute it or host it in a cloud service. The source code for the data providers is available under the MIT license at https://github.com/Microsoft/sqltoolsservice.

No.

However, next generation multi-OS CLI and GUI tools are open source. For example, the mssql extension for VS Code, mssql-scripter, and msql-CLI are all open source on GitHub. The source code for Azure Data Studio is available on GitHub.

No.

Investments in flagship Windows tools (SSMS, SSDT, PowerShell) will continue in addition to the next generation of multi-OS and multi-DB CLI and GUI tools. The goal is to offer customers the choice of using the tools they want on the platforms of their choice for their scenarios. Azure Data Studio is more tightly focused on the experiences around query editing and data development, which research has shown is the most heavily used capability in SQL Server Management Studio by an order of magnitude. Additional high-value administrative features such as backup, restore, agent job management, and server profiling are also available as extensions in Azure Data Studio. Azure Data Studio is also cross-platform, allowing users to work on their platform of choice. However, SQL Server Management Studio still offers the broadest range of administrative functions and remains the flagship tool for platform management tasks.

Use Azure Data Studio if you:

• Are mostly editing or executing queries.
• Need the ability to quickly chart and visualize result sets.
• Can execute most administrative tasks via the integrated terminal using sqlcmd or PowerShell.
• Have minimal need for wizard experiences.
• Don't need to do deep administrative or platform-related configuration.
• Need to run on macOS or Linux.

Use SQL Server Management Studio if you:

• Are doing complex administrative or platform configuration.
• Are doing security management, including user management, vulnerability assessment, and configuration of security features.
• Need to make use of performance tuning advisors and dashboards.
• Use database diagrams and table designers.
• Need access to Registered Servers.
• Make use of live query stats or client statistics.

For more details on differences between Azure Data Studio and Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS), visit What is Azure Data Studio.

It depends on the scenario & customer/business need. To help prioritize, file a suggestion and vote on existing at GitHub.

The SMO APIs aren't yet available on Linux or macOS in a consumable way. We ported over a subset of the SMO APIs to .NET Core that we needed for Azure Data Studio and we plan to expand as part of the roadmap. The SQL Tools Service is on GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/sqltoolsservice.

Yes.

SqlPackage is now available on .NET Core for Windows, macOS, and Linux. SQL Projects (SSDT) functionality is enabled in Azure Data Studio in the SQL Database Projects extension.

SQL PowerShell is available today on the PowerShell gallery and you can use it on Windows to work with SQL Server running anywhere, including SQL on Linux. Offering the SQL PowerShell cmdlets on Linux & macOS is in the roadmap. To help prioritize, file a suggestion on GitHub.

Developers and DBAs are usually the users of Azure Data Studio.

Yes.

Azure Data Studio support for Azure Synapse Analytics is currently in preview, together with Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server 2019 Big Data.

As SQL Server extends its capabilities into the Big Data space, it needs new tooling to support those use cases. For that reason, Azure Data Studio has shipped a new experience for SQL Server Big Data, including a notebook experience in the SQL Server toolset and a new Create External Table wizard that makes accessing data from remote SQL Server and Oracle instances easy and fast.

Yes.

However, not all VS Code extensions translate to Azure Data Studio.

• What is Azure Data Studio
• Download Azure Data Studio