T-SQL Tuesday #135 – Tools of the Trade

It’s another T-SQL Tuesday! Thanks to Mikey Bronowski (t|b) for hosting. Our challenge:

I would like you to write about the tools that help you at work, those that helped you the most or were the most effective. 

Whenever there is talk of switching tools, I always here someone say, “once we are on <insert tool>, we won’t have X problem anymore.” This statement is one of my pet peeves. It’s not the tool that solves the problem. It’s making sure we implement and use the tools properly to help solve the problem. The tools themselves are just that – tools. If we don’t understand the problem, then we’re just shifting the problem to another tool.

There area so many tools that get implemented at work these days. While I use them to varying degrees, I am not always using these tools on a daily basis. And in many cases, I’m not the person responsible for setting them up. I’m a SQL Developer so my daily toolset is much smaller.

Honestly, the vast majority of my time is split between Management Studio (SSMS) or Azure Data Studio. I’m pretty simple\straightforward this way. I started playing a lot more with Azure Data Studio over the past year, but I find I’m not able to make the switch to using it full time. It really depends on the task that I need to do.

So what tasks do I do often and which tool do I use?

Presenting with Azure Data Studio

I had the honor of being part of the first Data Platform Discovery Day event, held over two days – one for US and one for Europe. This was a virtual event designed for those who are new to the Microsoft Data Platform. I was honored that they picked me to present my “Back to the Basics: T-SQL 101” session.

I decided this was the perfect opportunity to play around more with SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio (ADS). I didn’t give myself a lot of time to get ready – just a couple of days.

Setting up Azure Data Studio

I’ve been wanting to work more with Azure Data Studio for a while. I attended Vicky Harp’s (t) session about SQL Server tools at PASS Summit and I really appreciated what I was seeing. But it’s hard to just jump to a new tool without having a goal. I think I finally found some good ones. I have several presentations to work on. After seeing others use Azure Data Studio for demos, I like the way it can add comments around the various code sections in notebooks so I decided that I want to use it for my sessions as well. Plus I like the idea that I can use one tool for SQL and for PowerShell. I can already see how useful that is so I want to play with that ability more as well.

It had been a while since I had installed ADS or updated it or probably even opened it to be honest. I still have it set up to have it show the welcome page when it starts. But this is what I saw: