What is Azure Data Studio? Should we use Azure Data Studio (ADS) or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)?

Azure Data Studio:

Azure Data Studio (ADS), is a Microsoft tool developed for use across different platforms. ADS can be used in Linux, macOS, and Windows. The main purpose of ADS is to execute and edit queries. ADS has in-built features to perform several tasks very easily like output charts, visualizing outputs, exporting outputs to CSV, JSON, and so on, which are not so straight forward via SSMS. Through ADS we can connect to on-premise instances, Azure instances, and SQL 2019 Big-Data Clusters. ADS have several in-built InSight widgets and we can develop our own InSight Widgets as well. InSight Widgets are customizable charts and graphs which we can add to monitoring dashboards.

Do we need SSMS still? Will it be discontinued?

As a Database professional I have been using SSMS for many years for managing SQL instances. When I first heard of ADS my main question was “Is Microsoft planning to discontinue SSMS?”. After studying about ADS, as of today, my answer is “NO”. ADS does have all the advantages mentioned earlier but for performing administrative tasks, performance tuning, and configuring security features we can do only through SSMS. Also, we can use SSMS for managing both on-premise and Azure instances.

What to use: SSMS or ADS?

Both are useful for different reasons. For performing DBA activities we need to use SSMS only. For many administrative tasks like AlwaysOn, Export\Import, Database Engine Tuning Advisor, SQL mail, Replication, and many more tasks we need to use SSMS. ADS can be used to work mainly with queries, if we need to see query outputs in charts, export outputs to XML, JSON, CSV files, to work on SQL 2019 Big Data Cluster and for HDFS integration.

Sample Visualization that can be done in ADS:

We will see how a simple select query “select * from SalesLT.ProductCategory” run on sample AdventureWorksLT database can be visualized in ADS.

Below is the output of the query in SSMS: 

With a single click in ADS, the same output can be viewed in a Grid format as shown below. There are many different formats like Grids, Stacks, Scatter, and so on.

In the next article, we will discuss how to install and use ADS.

Let me know in the comments section below if you started using ADS and what is the best feature you like in it.

Thanks VV!!

#SQL #SQLServer #SSMS #ADS #AzureDataStudio #SQLServerManagementStudio