Announcing the Release of Azure Data Studio 1.42

[AWS]

I just finished writing up the release notes for Azure Data Studio 1.42, and I cannot get over the amount of work the engineering team has completed since January. Go big or go home.

 

 

 

For regular users of Azure Data Studio, we hope you are starting to experience the improvements we have been making in the application. This continues with the 1.42 release, though we also found time to introduce new functionality as well.

 

 

 

Group by Schema

 

 

One of the original feature requests for Azure Data Studio was the ability to view objects by schema in Object Explorer (OE). Finally, that functionality is available in this release for the MSSQL provider:

 

 

 

Screenshot of group by schema enabled

 

 

 

The default behavior shows the objects grouped by type (Tables, Views, etc.) and can be quickly toggled by clicking the branching icon in the Servers View. The configuration persists through restarts of Azure Data Studio, and it applies across all MSSQL connections; it is not selective to instance or database.

 

 

 

We have also given users more control in terms of server timeouts for Object Explorer (OE). The default value is 45 seconds, and you can customize the OE option within Settings ( CTRL/CMD + , ) by changing Mssql > Object Explorer: Expand Timeout. For Azure SQL Database serverless and slower connections, more time might be needed for a response from the server, and increasing this value may reduce timeouts in those scenarios.

 

 

 

User Management

 

 

We are working on our roadmap for the coming year, and now seems like a fine time to mention that we are adding User Management capabilities. The feature is currently in Preview, but if you’re looking to create a server login, simply right-click on the Logins node and select New Login.

 

 

 

Screenshot of New Login menu option

 

 

 

User management is available for both traditional, on-prem instances (SQL and Windows authentication), and for Azure SQL DB (SQL and Azure Active Directory). Database users can also be created from the User node, (under the Security node in the database), and schema and role membership can be assigned or updated. We will continue to expand this functionality over the next couple releases as we bring it to GA, and would love to hear more about how you interact with SQL logins and users. Feel free to peruse the Azure Data Studio issues for the user management workstream, or drop into a discussion and share your feedback.

 

 

 

Connectivity

 

 

There are two significant changes related to connections to which we want to draw your attention. The first is an update to the Encrypt property for the MSSQL provider connections. In the November release (1.40) you may remember that the default value for the Encrypt property changed to True. In this release, we have completed support for all three encryption options: Strict, Mandatory (True), and Optional (False). New connections still default to Mandatory (True), but you now have the additional capability to enable Strict encryption for full support of TLS 1.3 with SQL Server 2022.

 

 

 

On the topic of the connection dialog, there is a new property, Host name in certificate, on the Advanced tab under Security. For servers that have a certificate configured, you must enter the Subject or DnsName used in the certificate in the Host name in certificate property.

 

 

 

Also on the Advanced tab, under Initialization, there now exists Command timeout. The default is 30 seconds, but for those of you with Azure SQL DB serverless you may find that increasing this timeout for those connections reduces timeout occurrences, as it allows the database additional time to come online if it’s been paused.

 

 

 

Screenshot of options in Advanced Properties for connections

 

 

 

The second significant change is the new setting Mssql Enable Sql Authentication Provider, which can be enabled in Settings (CTRL/CMD + , ). For those that connect to Azure SQL with Azure Active Directory and Multi-Factor Authentication (AAD + MFA), enabling this option allows connections to be maintained without the concern of losing access token lifetime or getting dropped by the server. Access tokens will be refreshed internally by the SqlClient driver whenever they are found to be expired. We expect this should benefit those who have previously reported issues related to loss of connectivity.

 

 

 

But that’s not all…the 1.42 release also adds support for connections to Microsoft Dataverse using the TDS endpoint, it has additional error reporting for Azure connections, and we introduced support for change password.

 

 

 

Additional Improvements

 

 

Those of you using arm64 Windows and macOS may notice that the application runs a little faster, as we have completed backend work to make the SqlToolsService (on which Azure Data Studio runs) support native arm64.

 

 

 

You may notice a few minor changes in the UI; we added New Deployment under the File menu:

 

 

 

Screenshot of New Deployment... menu option

 

 

 

and we changed the Add an account icon in the Linked Accounts pane (accessed by adding a new Azure account) to make it more consistent with our add action elsewhere.

 

 

 

Finally, in this release we have removed Big Data Cluster (BDC) support, as originally planned. There exists a separate download of ADS 1.41 that BDC customers can continue to use.

 

 

 

Wrap up

 

 

The complete list of improvements and bug fixes can be found on the release notes page, and please continue to report issues in GitHub. For those of you that like to keep pace and are willing to try out changes as we make them available, we encourage you download the Insiders build. New Insider builds are released daily and updates can be initiated by selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu. The Insider release can run side-by-side with the stable release on your machine.

 

 

 

We again thank the users that report issues, log feedback, and work with us to uncover the root problem. You are helping to make Azure Data Studio a better and more complete tool for managing data in Azure, and we appreciate your support.

 

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