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Tag: Notebooks

Postgres Plugin Support Added in Azure Data Studio!!

ck ck
March 18, 2019

I know I have been writing a lot about ADS recently, but this is even bigger than the Notebook announcement.

A Postgres plugin has been announced in the insider release of ADS, and it just works!

If the term Postgres is unfamiliar – PostgreSQL is one of the preeminent open source database solutions and is showing wide adoption due to its quality and of course, price.

For those of you in the Postgres world, you already have probably bounced between a few SQL clients and if you are like me, not been totally impressed with the results.

For those of you who are SQL Server Data professionals and live in the comfortable world of SSMS and ADS, you may not know that a significant part of the world still runs queries on the command line, or is forced to rebuild their own tool to meet their needs in each language de jour.

I have been working on some side projects with Docker, Postgres, and a few other pieces of tech, so this announcement was perfect for me to test it out.

Configuration

Just like my post on Notebooks, I am going to download the most recent release from the Insider’s build, but I am going to keep the screenshots a little more brief.

Make sure you enable those preview features!

Jump to the extensions section and find the Postgres plugin. (Sidebar button)

I used a local connection to a docker container hosting my Postgres instance and Azure Data Studio connected the first try!

Intellisense works great!

Notebooks instantly inferred my context from the Postgres connection! Sweet!

Even the explain button pulls the query plan 😀

I love this direction for Azure Data Studio and I hope we see more open source databases supported in the future!

Update: T-SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio

ck ck
March 18, 2019

It’s only been ten days since my first post about ADS Notebooks, and the team has already pushed out some super useful updates.

Now launching an Azure Data Studio Notebook now is almost instantaneous. You are not prompted to install the other kernels unless you select them.

When reopening a file, you no longer are prompted to re-install a kernel and attempt configuration.

Displays Azure Data Studio Notebooks behavior when reopening a notebook

Big thanks ADS team, Notebooks look to be shaping up to be a super cool tool!

T-SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio

ck ck
March 7, 2019

Update: This blog post is already out of date due to the hard work of the ADS team! Check my Azure Data Studio Notebook Update for more details of why you can skip my warnings about your internet connection.

I have been waiting for word about the new Notebook functionality in Azure Data Studio, and when I heard it was available in the insider build, I jumped in to take a look.

A Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to host programming languages, run code (often with different programming languages), return results, annotate your data, and importantly, share the source controlled results with your colleagues.

Alright, here’s what I did:

  • Grab the insider’s build from Github.
  • Install Azure Data Studio (ADS.)
  • Create a new Notebook (and have it download some stuff.)
  • Run some queries!

Keep in mind I am talking about the Insider’s Build as of as of Thursday March 7, 2019 – if you download it in the future changes are likely to have occurred.

If you want to follow along, make SURE you have a solid internet connection available, planes do NOT count.

Jump to the ADS Github page

Scroll to the latest insiders builds:

Extract or install, and launch Azure Data Studio.

Keep in mind you may want to disable updates when running the insider version, as it will try to update to the stable channel version. Thanks to Shawn Melton for the tip!

Install the tools by choosing File -> New Notebook.

The install process will warn you this will take awhile to download and configure the Jupyter environment (which includes python and a few other dependencies.)

Every time you create a new notebook, you are going to download the required dependencies from scratch – this is to ensure you have an isolated environment per notebook, but its worth keeping in mind for now.

Go get some coffee, its going to be a bit.

Maybe time for that second cup.

When our new notebook pops up, you should immediately be offered an option for a Code(TSQL) or a Text(markdown) box.

I wrote two example queries and added an animated gif (mostly because I was watching Chris on the SQL Tools team doing the same on the sqlbits presentation for ADS https://sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event18/Introducing_Azure_Data_Studio )

All the data you return is saved into your notebook, so you can see the same results as I did if you download my notebook, and you can replay it in your environment to see if it is the same.

Going to end it there for now, but I am excited to see what people will begin passing around in notebooks for debugging, training, and demonstration purposes!

Some issues I am going to be keeping my eyeballs on the next few weeks: