I thought I would have a quick look at the July 2020 Azure Data Studio update in this post. Due to the fact that it was released last week and wanted to check things.
You can read the release notes for Azure Data Studio in detail here.
Feature tour
First thing I was curious about was the feature tour. Because wondered how it would look compared to other Microsoft tours.
From the welcome page it’s very easy to enter as you can see below.
If you want to open it using the Command Palette instead you have to select ‘Help: User Welcome Tour’. Which you can see below.
From there the tour currently shows you five commonly used features within Azure Data Studio. At this moment in time the features highlighted are Connections, Notebooks, Extensions, Settings and finally Welcome Page.
I really like the concept of this tour. It gives you a brief overview of these commonly used features and then a link to the online documentation about them. Apart from the Welcome page. Which I assume is because that’s easy to find in Azure Data Studio.
For example, the below image shows how the Connections section appears.
After doing this I quickly looked at the new notebook features at the same time. Because whilst testing the headers I could see how they looked in the side-by-side preview.
Password issue
I looked at the ‘Resolved bugs and issues’ list this month to see if the password issue I had identified in an old post about using version control with notebooks was on there. Which you can read in detail here.
It did not appear on the list, but I thought I would try it anyway.
I did encounter an unusual issue whilst trying to deploy a new container. For some reason the notebook being created by the wizard appeared blank. So, as a test I closed Azure Data Studio and ran it as Administrator. When I did that the wizard worked.
After doing that I ran Azure Data Studio again and the notebook appeared to have been created properly. It could well be an issue with the laptop I was using. However, if you get the same issue I recommend trying the above.
Once I had the notebook created to deploy a new cluster I checked if the password issue still existed. Even though it’s not in the list of resolved items I can confirm it longer shows the password.
Drag and drop
After creating the container for the password test, I looked at another new feature. Which is where you can drag and drop columns and tables directly into the query window now.
I can confirm that dragging both columns and tables works fine. However, be aware that dragging views does not work.
Final word
I hope this quick look at the July 2020 Azure Data Studio update proved to be useful.
It’s good to see so much progress with Azure Data Studio updates. In addition, it’s good to see that Microsoft are listening to feedback because it means I can now share notebooks in Azure DevOps safer.
I’m aware some folks have yet to use Azure Data Studio. With this in mind, if you have used it feel free to share your experiences of using it below with a comment.
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