I would think that the majority of SQL Server professionals primarily use SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) to do everything they need in their day-to-day work and I’ll wager that many have never tried using Azure Data Studio; but, they should.

This post isn’t about why you should give Azure Data Studio a try. Instead, I’d like to focus on a new feature called Notebooks. If you’re unfamiliar with the notebook concept don’t worry they are easy to work with and actually quite cool.

A few things to know

1. To start using Notebooks in Azure Data Studio, simply press CTRL-SHIFT-N or choose New Notebook from the File menu.
2. You can add code or text blocks and they can be added before or after existing blocks.
3. Each code block is similar to a stored proc in that declared variables and table variables are only available in the block itself and are not accessible to any other block of code.
4. Temp tables are at the connection level and they can be used at anytime by another code block as long as they have been created before use. Nothing new here.
5. You don’t have to use T-SQL. In fact you can change the kernel to several different types such as python.

As it turns out I was on a six hour flight from NYC to Seattle on an old Alaska plane that didn’t have any screens in the seats. Having nothing better to do I thought I’d gamble with Notebooks or at least see if I could make a gambling game to use for demo purposes.   First thing you’ll need is Azure Data Studio installed. Once that’s done you can check out my Black Jack notebook.

I believe learning should be fun and often times unconventional ways of learning are the best. While the code for the game is not “production ready”, it’s not meant to be either. My hopes are that the game gives you a few scenarios that help you quickly acclimate to this new cool feature. Enjoy!

Along the way different projects had different requirements and challenges. To take these on and be a better DBA, I learned VB 6 and then VB.NET. A C++/C# developer asked why I was wasting my time relearning VB when I could learn a real language (C#). Years later I got tired of TechNet samples being only C# and I learned it and primarily use C# as my dev language of choice today.

Fast forward to today. Microsoft’s push to open source and multi-platform means more languages to learn. SQL Operations Studio is like SQL’s Management Studio but it’s multi-platform. So picture connecting to SQL Server from a Mac or Linux without having to emulate Windows. Cool, right?

Since this is multi-platform you’d kinda guess that it’s not a full-on .NET project. In fact, you may also think that the development would be done in some flavor of Visual Studio but it’s not. There’s a newer product called Visual Studio Code and this is not a SKU of Visual Studio 2017. That’s right! Your dev work for SQLOpsStudio extensions will not be done in Visual Studio but instead in VS Code.

This is listed plain as day on this tutorial on extensions but is easy for a non-developer to confuse:

https://medium.com/@kevcunnane/writing-a-sql-operations-studio-extension-in-15-minutes-7dfd24a74dfe

So what about the development itself? To start, one of the requirements is Node.js be installed and when looking at the sample extensions you’ll note that there’s a lot of JSON and TypeScript. JavaScript is also an option.

As you may recall from the start of this post, JavaScript, Node.js, and TypeScript weren’t mentioned. This means it’s time to expand and add to my skillset again. There’s plenty of places to start learning. One such place is LinkedIn Learning. I’ve not used it yet but plan to study up on TypeScript today. Check it out here:

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/topics/typescript

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/topics/node-js

If you’re interested in writing your own extension you may also want to read over the Extension Authoring wiki on github:

https://github.com/Microsoft/sqlopsstudio/wiki/Extension-Authoring