The March release of SQL Operations Studio is now available

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

We are excited to announce the March 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 March release is the fourth major update since the announcement. In case you missed it, you can view the February release announcement here.

Take a moment to breathe, this is a loaded update.

The March Public Preview release is focused on improving our Extensibility story and continuing to address top GitHub issues. This includes enabling Extension Manager, improving the Manage Dashboard experience and providing a couple Insights extensions. Please see the following details.

Enhance the Manage Dashboard extensibility model to support tabbed Insights and Configuration panes

Dashboard Insights extensions for sp_whoisactive from whoisactive.com and a Server Reports example

from whoisactive.com and a Server Reports example Extension Manager enables simple acquisition of 1st-party and 3rd-party extensions

Add additional Extensibility APIs for connection and objectexplorer management

and management Community Localization open for 10 languages

Continue to fix important customer impacting GitHub issues

For complete updates, refer to the Release Notes.

Extension Manager enables simple acquisition of 1st-party and 3rd-party extensions

The Extension Manager makes it easy to discover and acquire additional SQL Operations Studio functionality. We’ve adopted the in-product extension management experience from Visual Studio Code. For users unfamiliar with this UI it consists of the following components.

‘Marketplace’ of Recommend Extensions which can be easily discovered and installed

List of Installed Extensions which can be disabled or uninstalled

Extension Details page that displays the extensions readme content and other metadata

Extensibility is a key tenet of the SQL Operations Studio project roadmap. We plan to make available both 1st and 3rd features as extensions. We look forward to working with the community to build a rich tools ecosystem. Please contact us on Gitter if you’re interested in building an extension.

Note: If you don’t see the Extension Manager icon you may need to enable it by right-clicking on the left Activity Bar, and then click Extensions on the context menu.

Dashboard Insights extensions for sp_whoisactive from whoisactive.com

The March release introduces improved Manage Dashboard extensibility. Extensions can now provide tab panels to the dashboard to group related functionality. Check out the sp_whoisactive extension as a great example of using the dashboard insights extensibility points.

Here are some notes from the extension readme: Sp_whoisactive is a procedure written by Microsoft MVP Adam Machanic. It is a very useful tool for activity monitoring and troubleshooting.

Who is Active is a DMV-based monitoring stored procedure that uses 15 different views to show a large amount of data about what’s running on your server.

Who is Active was designed to be extremely flexible, and includes options to not only get different types of data, but also to change the output column list and sort order.

Check out the source code for the whoisactive extension and other extensibility samples.

Join the extensibility ecosystem

With these extensibility investments, we want to empower the community to build their own extensions and join our extensibility ecosystem. We strongly believe that our talented SQL Server community can build awesome extensions, and we have provided resources to help get you started:

Community Localization Open

Recently, we announced SQL Operations Studio availability on the new Microsoft Community Localization platform. Localization is now opened for 10 languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese (Brazil). You can contribute to localization for both software and docs.

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.