The November 2020 release of Azure Data Studio is now available

The November release of Azure Data Studio is now available. Download Azure Data Studio and review the release notes to get started.

Azure Data Studio is a multi-database, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the Microsoft family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. To learn more, visit our GitHub.

The key highlights to cover this month include:

  • Added SQL to notebook support
  • Added notebook parameterization support
  • Added results streaming for SQL Notebooks
  • Bug Fixes

For a list of complete updates, refer to the Azure Data Studio release notes.

Added SQL to notebook support

From past user feedback, the SQL community wanted an easy way to get started with notebooks. One direct ask was the ability to convert .SQL files into notebooks so that users could get started with notebooks right away. With the November release, users can now convert .SQL files to notebooks as well as convert SQL notebooks to .SQL files.

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When you open a SQL file in Azure Data Studio, you will now see an option to Export as Notebook. This will parse the file and add text and code cells based on the structure of the file. This makes it easier to try out notebooks for the first time with your own SQL files.

In addition, SQL notebooks now have a toolbar option to convert into a .SQL file.

Added notebook parameterization support

Another feature request was to provide support for parameters in a notebook. Parameterization is the ability to execute the same notebook with different parameters.

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With this release of Azure Data Studio, users will now be able to utilize Papermill’s ability to parameterize, execute, and store notebooks. By stating the parameters cell as the first code cell in your notebook, it ensures that the injected parameters in the outputted parameterized notebook will be placed directly after the original parameters cell. That way the parameterized notebook will utilize the newly injected parameters instead of the original parameters cell.

Users can utilize Papermill CLI as well as the Python API  to pass in a new set of parameters quickly and efficiently as shown below.

Added results streaming for SQL Notebooks

SQL notebooks in the past did not have a great way of streaming results when running large queries. With this release, we now provide results streaming of SQL queries so that you can see information from your query more quickly.

New extension updates

With this release, we have pushed out new versions of the following extensions. If you have not tried out these extensions before, check out each extension’s documentation and try it out.

Bug fixes

If you would like to help make Azure Data Studio a great product, share any feedback or report issues through our Issues page. Our engineering team is regularly going through the untriaged issues and assigning issues into different monthly milestones so that you know we are working on it. Your votes on issues help us prioritize.

A full list of bug fixes for the November release can be found here.

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 or tweet us @AzureDataStudio.