Recently, Microsoft announced that they will be sunsetting Azure Data Studio (ADS).
In other words, ADS is off to Software Valhalla, where it will join Query Analyzer and SQL Enterprise Manager. (And SQL Server for Itanium and SQL Server for Alpha and Multiplan and Professional Development System and QuickBasic and QuickC and many, many other things (Microsoft or not) that exist only as memories.)
This announcement was a bummer, but I was surprised at my lack of surprise. It was more of a "yeah, I guess that makes sense" rather than a "oh, wait-what?" or "I thought they were going to get rid of SSMS". Remember when Microsoft helpfully (?) installed ADS when you installed SSMS?
I've been using SSMS since SQL Server 2005 When I started working with SQL Server, I used Query Analyzer because that is what was available. Which means that I used Query Analyzer for about six or seven years. How could it have been that long? No one remembers good old QA anymore-it was more responsive and less complicated than SSMS.
I liked Azure Data Studio. In the last five years, I've probably spent more time with it than any other application, other than a web browser. I used ADS as my daily driver for all of that time. I spent thousands of hours with it and wrote many thousands (tens of thousands?) of lines of SQL code with it.
More soberly, I've been installing ADS alongside:
- Visual Studio (because I need that for some stuff)
- Visual Studio Code (because I need that for other stuff (like PowerShell) and things like CSV files (because I'd have to use NotePad++ if I not for VSC extensions)
- SQL Server Managment Studio (because I need that for even more other stuff)
My favorite ADS features, in no particular order, were:
- Git support. I have actually used old-school TFS with VS and SSMS, years and years ago.
- Easy theming, including font choice, sizing and dark mode.
- More rational options dialog-I feel like I can actually find stuff-stuff that might be in SSMS but I'll never see it.
- Sharing of profiles between copies of ADS installed on different computers. This predated similar support for VSC, IIRC.
- Ctrl+ and Ctrl- for easy scaling changes
- Easy search for files (IOW: Ctrl-P)
- Wildcard expansion for "SELECT *", which was actually the thing that pulled me into ADS to start with.
- The never-seemed-ready-for-prime-time extension market. I feel that easy installation of extensions, like what was available in VSC, is key to adoption of things like extensions. Ask me about my (long-retired) Nokia E71 and Java apps. Another take: How many SSMS extensions have you installed?
- I did not like accidentally starting PowerShell sessions and opening PS1 files in ADS, when what I wanted was to use the debugger in VSC.
- I did not feel that I could uninstall SSMS and not miss it. For "fiddly things", like digging into SQL Agent jobs, digging into database properties or query plans, I never felt as confident with VSC as I did with SSMS.
- The SQL Project extension always feels weird-especially the Publish feature-when I compare it to how VS SSDT does the same thing. By "weird" I mean "Am I doing this the right way or am I about to nuke production?" I haven't really tried this in VSC yet.
- I did not like having to keep ADS and VSC up to date, on two or three different workstations, with frequent updates that don't get taken care of with the "regular" Windows updates. I feel like I spent one or two hours a month just updating "stuff" and I'm always concerned about what might have broken by an update.
