There is a new free software from Microsoft (preview for now) which allows you to manage databases. As you know, previously I have blogged about 5 Free Alternatives to Microsoft SQL Management Studio, so this post is kind of a follow up on that. Microsoft SQL Operations Studio can manage SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
You can run it from Windows, Mac or Linux computer as there are installers for all those platforms. The product is free to use for private or commercial use. It's designed for database develppers, database admins or system admins. It has a lot of built-in tools which can be further expanded via extensions.
There is a planned support for SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, so you'll be able to configure, monitor or troubleshoot AG for your critical DBs and failover to secondary DB in case of disaster.
There is also SQL PowerShell module which is available on the PowerShell gallery and you can use it on Windows to work with SQL Server running anywhere, including SQL on Linux.
Quote from the product page:
Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code editor with IntelliSense. SQL Operations Studio (preview) offers a modern, keyboard-focused T-SQL coding experience that makes your everyday tasks easier with built-in features, such as multiple tab windows, a rich T-SQL editor, IntelliSense, keyword completion, code snippets, code navigation, and source control integration (Git). Run on-demand T-SQL queries, view and save results as text, JSON, or Excel. Edit data, organize your favorite database connections, and browse database objects in a familiar object browsing experience.
As you can see, the product has some great tools to work with. It's still in a preview and active development. This march preview has brought in those features:
Quote:
The March Public Preview continues to address the top GitHub issues and is focused on improving our extensibility story. Specifically enabling Extension Manager, improving dashboard management, and providing SQL Agent and insights extensions. This release includes the following enhancements:
- Enhance the dashboard extensibility model to support tabbed insights and configuration panes.Extension Manager enables simple acquisition of extensions.
- Dashboard extensions for sp_whoisactive from whoisactive.com.
Screenshot from the lab showing a possibility to do a backup or restore operations on selected DB.
Microsoft SQL Operations Studio – Extensibility
Interesting features are Extensions, which can provide an easy way to add more functionality to the base SQL Operations Studio. Extensions are provided by the SQL Operations Studio team (Microsoft), as well as the 3rd party community.
You can find the Installed, recommended or most popular extensions within the product
Microsoft SQL Operations Studio – Features
Quote from the product page:
Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code editor with IntelliSense – SQL Operations Studio (preview) offers a modern, keyboard-focused T-SQL coding experience that makes your everyday tasks easier with built-in features, such as multiple tab windows, a rich T-SQL editor, IntelliSense, keyword completion, code snippets, code navigation, and source control integration (Git). Run on-demand T-SQL queries, view and save results as text, JSON, or Excel. Edit data, organize your favorite database connections and browse database objects in a familiar object browsing experience.
You can right-click a table to edit its data
Then you'll have a new tab which opens, so you have a possibility to edit the values….
Smart T-SQL code snippets – T-SQL code snippets generate the proper T-SQL syntax to create databases, tables, views, stored procedures, users, logins, roles, etc., and to update existing database objects. Use smart snippets to quickly create copies of your database for development or testing purposes, and to generate and execute CREATE and INSERT scripts. SQL Operations Studio (preview) also provides functionality to create custom T-SQL code snippets.
Customizable Server and Database Dashboards – Create rich customizable dashboards to monitor and quickly troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in your databases. To learn about insight widgets, and database (and server) dashboards, see Manage servers and databases with insight widgets.
Connection management (server groups) – Server groups provide a way to organize connection information for the servers and databases you work with.
Integrated Terminal – Use your favorite command-line tools (for example, Bash, PowerShell, sqlcmd, bcp, and ssh) in the Integrated Terminal window right within the SQL Operations Studio user interface.
The product looks really promising. It has fast release cycle. As you can see from the release notes, there is a new release every month.
The fact that you can manage local SQL servers in groups, Azure SQL Db and Data Warehouse makes that a good fit for every database admin. You can install it on Windows, macOS, and Linux which is really convenient depending what's your desktop/laptop choice for work.
The online documentation makes it easy to learn. I quickly went through to be able to initiate a connection to one of my DBs and I've done screenshots.
Links:
- GitHub
- SQL Operations Studio Product page at Microsoft
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