Troubleshooting SQL Server made easy via Notebooks – seeking your feedback

Microsoft

Sep 22, 2021

As part of our journey in making troubleshooting experience easier for our customers, we have learned from our research and studies, that Jupyter Notebook is a great way to do this. Code and documentation can be in one place, which boosts users’ workflow. To continue in this effort, we are currently experimenting with SQL Server DOCs articles that are rich with code snippets. These articles are ideal for executable troubleshooting guides in Jupyter Notebook format that can be launched, edited and executed directly in Azure Data Studio client tool, i.e. less copying and pasting!

To illustrate the new experience, a database administrator, Gloria, searches online on how to troubleshoot SQL Server Error 9002. She finds an article such as Troubleshooting a Full Transaction Log (SQL Server Error 9002) which shows an [Open Notebook in Azure Data Studio] button. Clicking on the button will allow Gloria to launch a Jupyter Notebook equivalent to the article, in order to troubleshoot SQL Server Error 9002 in Azure Data Studio.

This allows Gloria then to read through the description about the error in the notebook, and then execute the code cells to start diagnosing. No copy and pasting!

Articles with troubleshooting notebooks (Preview)

To try out this new Docs to Jupyter Notebooks experience, check out these two articles. In these articles, you can click on “Open Notebook in Azure Data Studio” which will launch the equivalent notebook for the article. Please note that you will need to have Azure Data Studio installed on your local machine first (http://aka.ms/getAzureDataStudio).

These articles were selected for this experimentation phase due to high frequency of these problems being reported to Microsoft CSS.