Azure Data Studio is a great application for working with databases on Azure. Here are a few hints to improve quality of life on Azure Data Studio.
Coloured SQL Query Tabs
One frustration I had originally is that unlike many other database management packages Azure Data Studio does not colour tabs differently for different database connections. Azure Data Studio does display the connection as text in the top bar, but is not presented in a glanceable format. This could lead to human error, where you accidentally make development changes to production environments.
Fortunately there is a workaround. While you can’t colour database connections directly, you can add them to server groups. Then you can colour the server groups to get coloured tabs.
First click the New Server Group button to create a new group.
Give it a name and select a colour for the group
Next go to File > Preferences > Settings and search for “tab color” (american spelling). Set the tab colour mode to “fill”
Finally drag your databases into the server groups and restart Azure Data Studio.
Now when you right click on a database connection and select “New Query” you will get tab coloured according to server group. Hooray no more squinting at the top bar to work out which database is connected.
Reaching Inaccessible Tabs
One unfortunate shortcoming of Azure Data Studio is that if you open a lot of tabs, the tab bar at the top can become over full and you can’t easily get to the tabs. fortunately there is a shortcut to allow you to access tabs which have gone off screen. Ctrl-Tab gives you a list of tabs and keeping Ctrl held down while tapping Tab will cycle through your tabs to the one you want to select
The Command Palette
All kinds of useful things hide in the command palette. You can open it with Ctrl-Shift-P
Shortcuts
There are plenty of other shortcuts in Azure Data Studio. Fortunately plenty of people have made cheatsheets. Here is a link to just one example https://am2.co/2018/02/updated-cheat-sheet/
