Just in time for Microsoft Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit, version 1.47.0 of Azure Data Studio is available with some great new features and a number of bug fixes.
The latest features land in preview first. In order to try out anything that is listed as preview, you need to enable the Workbench: Enable Preview Features setting (access Settings using Ctrl/CMD + , ).
We love to hear your feedback! You can go directly to the repo, or within Azure Data Studio select Help -> Report Issue. You do need a GitHub account to create issues. Feel free to share any ideas for how we can make your life easier in our repo as well.
New features in Azure Data Studio 1.47
A change that many are sure to notice quickly is Azure AD is Becoming Microsoft Entra ID. The key takeaway here is that we want to make the transition seamless for you and your organization. There are no changes to any Azure AD capabilities, APIs, login URLs, PowerShell cmdlets, Microsoft authentication library (MSAL), developer experiences, or tooling. Only the name has changed.
Another change that is sure to be noticed is that we have enabled parallel message processing by default. This change will improve the performance of the application when connected to SQL Server data sources. We have introduced two new settings to manage this new behavior. The first setting, Mssql: Parallel Message Processing is set to true by default. The other setting, Mssql: Parallel Message Processing Limit, has a default of 100. This setting controls the number of threads used for parallel processing. We are excited to hear your impressions on the impact of this change.
If you regularly save results to Excel, there are some new settings that are going to save you a bunch of time. These new options under settings allow you to configure Azure Data Studio to automatically do the most common formatting for Excel so that you don’t have to.
We’ve also done some additional work on context menu options in object explorer. Below you can see the new “Rename” option. There is also a new menu item to Select Top 1000 rows for history tables of system-versioned temporal tables and adjusted some of the wording on other options to make them clearer.
Visual Studio Code Improvements
This release of Azure Data Studio incorporates upstream improvements from Visual Studio Code 1.80, 1.81, and 1.82. These releases contained numerous new features as well as quality, performance, stability, and compliance enhancements. The full details can be reviewed in the Visual Studio Code release notes at: Visual Studio Code June 2023, Visual Studio Code July 2023, and Visual Studio Code August 2023.
Here are a few of the things that we think are exciting:
It is now possible to resize the content hover control. You can now drag the edges to change the size of the hover.
There is a new command Help: Troubleshoot Issue in the Command Palette to help you troubleshoot an issue in Azure Data Studio. The command kicks off a workflow that helps identify the cause of an issue by enabling and disabling installed extensions. While it is toggling the extensions, you try to reproduce the issue to narrow down the extension causing the issue, saving time when reporting an issue.
It is now possible to collapse unchanged regions in the diff editor. This can be turned on by enabling diffEditor.experimental.collapseUnchangedRegions. This feature helps a lot when reviewing large files with a lot of unchanged lines.
The borders of the hidden-line(s) blocks can be dragged or clicked to reveal text from the bottom or top.
Extended regions:
Collapsed regions:
There have been several improvements to the Sticky Scroll UI, available at the top of the editor (View: Toggle Sticky Scroll). Sticky scroll sections can be scrolled sideways when the editor’s horizontal scrollbar is scrolled. This feature can be turned off by disabling editor.stickyScroll.scrollWithEditor. It is also possible to view the last line of a sticky scroll scope by holding the Shift key and hovering over a Sticky Scroll line. Clicking on a line while holding Shift moves the editor cursor to the last line of the scope. Folding icons have also been added to the Sticky Scroll gutter. The rendering of these icons follows the setting editor.showFoldingControls that controls the rendering of the folding icons in the editor gutter.
Summary
If you are already an Azure Data Studio user, please update to Azure Data Studio 1.47. Within the application, simply select Help -> Check for Updates. If you’re new to Azure Data Studio head on over to the download and install Azure Data Studio page and we’ll walk you through the quickest way to get it installed.
If you’re looking for a specific fix or improvement, a complete list of improvements and fixes for this and previous versions can be found in the release notes.
Please let us know what you think of the new features. We love to hear your feedback!