[techno music]
>>Hi. I'm Michael Otey of SolarWinds contributor
and president of TECA Inc. and this is
a first look at SQL Operations Studio.
So, what are we going to talk about here?
We're going to first dive into
what SQL Operations Studio is.
Then we're going to look at some of the details
about how you use SQL Server Operations Studio,
how you connect to SQL server instances,
how you perform some basic
database management with it,
how you do T-SQL and query development,
and then we're going to look
at one of it's interesting features,
the Integrated Terminal.
So, what exactly is SQL Server Operations Studio?
Well, ever since Microsoft released SQL server
on Linux, a lot of DBAs have wondered
is Microsoft going to come out with a version
of SQL Server management studio on Linux,
and so far the answer to that has been no,
but what Microsoft actually did was they came out
with this cross platform SQL Operations Studio
product which is currently in preview.
This is based on the lightweight visual studio
code base which is a lightweight
but very powerful and extensible editor
and it runs natively on multiple platforms
like Windows, the Mac, and Linux.
This can connect to SQL Server on Windows
as well as SQL Server on Linux as your SQL
database and as you SQL data warehouse.
The tool looks exactly the same running
on all of the different platforms whether
it's running on Windows, Mac or Linux
and here you can see a list
of supported platforms
that SQL Operations Studio will run on.
It will run natively on Windows 10, 8, 7,
Windows server 2016, back to Windows server 2008,
as well as the Mac OS 10.13 and 12, 10.12,
Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux and Ubuntu,
so you can see it does have
very good cross platform support.
When you go to use this tool, you basically
install it, each of the different
operating systems that it's supported on
has an installer that is native
to that operating system, so once it's installed,
as soon as you bring it up, you get
a connection screen very much like you see here.
If you've ever used Visual Studio Code
you can tell that sometimes that's not
the most intuitive tool to connect to SQL Server.
Here with SQL Operations Studio, it's quite easy,
right on the initial login screen you have
what is basically a standard SQL Server login
prompt where you talk about
what connection you're using,
the server name you're connecting to,
whether you're using SQL or Windows
authentication, the user and authentication
that you're using to connect into,
the database and optionally a server group.
You can group your different servers
into color coded groups with this tool
which is kind of a handy feature.
Once you're connected,
you get this dashboard that you see here.
The dashboard gives you a servers pane,
it allows you to perform navigation
through the different databases
and the different database objects.
You also get what is called an insight
or a quick little taskbar that you can use
to perform common tasks like restore databases,
configure them, write new queries,
as well as search databases.
One of the, I guess I'd say,
the primary strengths of this tool
is in in T-SQL queries,
it's very strong about that.
It's management capabilities are not on par
with SQL Server management studio,
but it does have management for the most
common tasks like backup, restore,
navigating databases and so on.
When you get to the Query Editor,
you can see that it is
a very powerful Query Editor.
It supports color coded syntax,
IntelliSense, Code completion.
You can have pop-up definitions
like you see here.
If you hover over one of the different columns
it will give you a definition of the columns.
You have the ability to go to the definitions
of those columns if you want to.
When you run the query, you can click
this run button up here or press F5
like you've been used to
with SQL Server management studio.
You can also disconnect, change connections,
or if you hit this explain button over here,
you will get a graphical representation
of the query plan at the bottom of the window
which is a pretty nice feature.
One of the other interesting features here
is the integrated terminal.
From the integrated terminal you can hit this
by going to the view integrated terminal option.
It'll bring up basically a command window
that's right within your tool itself.
This means you don't have to go external
to execute commands on whatever system
you're running on.
That can be pretty handy.
You can use it to execute Bash
if you're running on a Linux system,
or PowerShell, PowerShell on Windows,
Command Shell.
You can also use this
to run Sqlcmd, Bcp and Ssh.
Very handy window to have.
I've found this window to be pretty handy
for working with docker and docker commands
with SQL Server Containers.
Anyway, now we've had a quick overview,
let's have a look of what this is like
and here's our initial connection
with SQL Operations Studio.
You can see when we come up we have this
nice convenient connection dialog
which we can fill out with what is basically
the standard SQL Server connection
type of information.
Click our connect button and at this point
we'll go ahead and connect into the system.
And now we've got a connection
into our SQL Server system and you can see
in our servers pane over here we have
navigation where we can navigate
through the different databases
that are over here.
We can also look at the security objects
like link servers, logins, server roles,
as well as server objects like endpoints
and link servers, so if we want to dig
into a table we can certainly
go into any one of these.
SQL Server let's us look at,
oh, we'll go down to
the editorial DB database maybe
and expand the tables in there,
look at articles, tables.
We can also go into, say, northwind.
We'll open that up,
there's some VITs tables.
We have maybe a customer's table.
Let's go ahead and have
a mnemonic query for this.
We'll select the top 1000 here,
and this will open up our new query pane.
Here's the query, you can see it's using
Intellisense here.
It's automatically executed it, but if we wanted
to run it, again, we could hit that.
If it was a query we are writing,
if we want to look at the definitions,
we can hover over here and we get
a definition of each of the data types
that we've got going on, that's handy.
If we want to look at query plans,
we can hit this, and you can see we've got
a graphical query plan coming up here.
One of the other handy features is that is has
that integrated terminal window, so if we want
to open up a terminal window,
we can hit that, and here's our terminal window,
Since we're running on Windows here
we've got PowerShell and we could just
enter basically whatever commands we want
to look at here, so why not do a DIR.
There's a command, we've executed it.
We didn't have to leave
SQL Operations manager at all.
We can close up our terminal window by hitting
the trash can and if we look around here
we can see we can restore databases,
we can configure new widgets,
we can execute queries or we can search
through the databases that are here.
And that's the end of our first look
at SQL Operations Studio.
Thanks for watching.