The May release of SQL Operations Studio is now available

UPDATE: SQL Operations Studio is now GA and renamed to Azure Data Studio. For the most up to date information please visit our monthly Azure Data Studio blog post and download and install the latest release here.


This post is co-authored by Karl Burtram, Senior Software Engineer, SQL Server.  

We are excited to announce the May release of SQL Operations Studio is now available.

Download SQL Operations Studio and review the Release Notes to get started.

SQL Operations Studio is a data management tool that enables you to work with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL DW from Windows, macOS and Linux. To learn more, visit our Github.

SQL Operations Studio was announced for Public Preview on November 15th at Connect(), and this May release is the sixth major update since the announcement. If you missed it, you can view the April release announcement.

The May Public Preview release is focused on improving our Extensibility experience with the release of new extensions as well as addressing top Github issues.

Highlights for this build include the following.

  • Announcing Redgate SQL Search extension available in Extension Manager
  • Community Localization available for 10 languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese!
  • GDPR-compliant build has reduced telemetry collection, improved opt-out experience and in-product links to Privacy Statement
  • Extension Manager has improved Marketplace experience to easily discover community extensions
  • SQL Agent extension Jobs and Job History view improvement
  • Updates for whoisactive and Server Reports extensions
  • Fix GitHub Issues

For complete updates, refer to the Release Notes.

Announcing Redgate SQL Search extension

Redgate SQL Search in SQL Operations Studio extension is now available for installation through the Extension Manager Marketplace! The SQL Search extension lets you find database objects across an active connection. The search results makes it simple to jump to the object in the Object Explorer or to view the object’s definition.

We definitely recommend installing this extension. As SQL Ops Studio evolves, we will rely heavily on extensions to provide core functionality, so we expect that most users will want to have several extensions installed for the best experience.

Startup Performance improvements

We want SQL Operations Studio to be fast and efficient to maximize user productivity. Reducing the time it takes to launch SQL Ops Studio is one of the key scenarios where we’ve been making continual investments. Fortunately, our upstream platform, Visual Studio Code, is also optimizing this same scenario. One key improvement we merged from VS Code’s February release was ASAR Node module bundling.

We use product telemetry from the Startup scenario to understand how long users are waiting for SQL Ops Studio to launch. This telemetry allowed us to confirm that the April Public Preview delivered approximately 30-40 percent startup time improvements for most users. Particularly users experiencing the slowest startups have seen the largest improvements.

The below chart shows startup times bucketed into key percentiles: 25, 50, 75, 90, 95, 98, 99 percent. At the risk of being pedantic, this would mean, for example, at the 50 percent bucket half the startups were faster than that time and half the startups were slower than that time.

Community Localization available

Community Localization resources for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are available for the May Public Preview. We’ll continue working over the next couple months to get the product 100 percent localized.

We’d like to thank the translation community for helping to make SQL Operations Studio available to users in their preferred language!

The below screenshot shows an example using the Italian locale.

GDPR compliance

There are several updates in May Public Preview that were needed for GDPR compliance. Specifically, we reduced the telemetry being collected, improved the opt-out experience by adding a notification on first launch, and added a Privacy Statement item to the Help menu.

Extension Manager enhancements

The Extension Manager Recommended section has been replaced with a Marketplace section. The Marketplace will display all available extensions. Recommended extensions are sorted to the top.

Check out some of our 1st-party and community contributed extensions. And take a look at our Extensibility Getting Started page to see how easy it is to add your own extension to the marketplace!

Fix GitHub issues

Here is a summary of issues addressed:

  • #703 Entering HTML-like text in edit data causes value to display incorrectly until refresh
  • #821 sqlopsstudio.deb package dependency
  • #1260 keyword ‘distinct’ not highlighted
  • #1332 Edit data revert row doesn’t work
  • #1215 SQL Agent extension and the status bar
  • #1316 SQL Agent Don´t resize after change windows size
  • Improve Manage Dashboard Properties scrolling

Contact us

If you have any feature requests or issues, please submit to our Github issues page. For any questions, feel free to comment below, message us on Gitter, or tweet us @SQLOpsStudio.