Santiago Arias and Alex Tercete

7 May 2018

3 Comments

Welcome to Redgate tools for SQL Operations Studio

The Preview release of Microsoft’s SQL Operations Studio marks a big change in database development. Following on from the ability to run SQL Server 2017 on Linux, it makes the promise of cross-platform SQL Server development a reality.

Built on top of Visual Studio Code, SQL Operations Studio is a free lightweight tool for modern database development and operations that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It’s been designed for developers without a deep knowledge of database administration, so that they can manage databases and maintain them.

That’s not the end of the story

As the leading Microsoft SQL Server tools vendor, Redgate has spent over a decade developing tools that plug into and integrate with SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio. Those tools speed up database development by making difficult tasks ingeniously simple.

Microsoft welcomes them too and is now working with Redgate and other parties to build a rich tools ecosystem for SQL Operations Studio. The March release includes an Extension Manager which makes it simple to discover and acquire additional functionality.

SQL Search for SQL Operations Studio is the first step

At Foundry, Redgate’s R&D Division, we’ve been looking into the feasibility of making our software available for SQL Operations Studio for a while. We want to explore the benefits – and the challenges – of cross-platform development, and find out if users like the idea of Redgate extensions.

The first outcome of this approach is SQL Search for SQL Operations Studio, which is now in Preview. SQL Search is the most popular tool Redgate has ever developed and the version for SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio 2017 has been downloaded more than half a million times.

It’s one of those small but really useful free tools that saves hours of time and lots of frustration by finding fragments of SQL in tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and jobs. Importantly, it also searches across multiple object types and multiple databases, and allows users to quickly navigate to wherever the fragments happen to be on a server.

The new extension for SQL Operations Studio gives developers who prefer this cross-platform tool the same functionality on the Windows, macOS and Linux platform.

The launch is particularly welcome because, as Redgate’s 2018 State of Database DevOps Survey shows, 76% of organizations have developers in their team who work across both applications and databases. Their greatest challenge is synchronizing application and database changes, and overcoming different approaches to development within multi-function teams.

SQL Operations Studio addresses part of the dilemma by allowing developers to stay with their favored platform as they move between application and database development. We want to discover if there’s the same appetite among users for the kind of added functionality Redgate tools provide.

The next step is down to you

SQL Search is a recommended extension for SQL Operations Studio and can be found in the Extension Manager Marketplace of the May Public Preview release:

Clicking the Install button takes users to the Foundry downloads page, where SQL Search can be downloaded. Once installed, it can be used from within SQL Operations Studio in, literally, a couple of clicks and becomes part of the natural workflow.

We’d love to hear your feedback. How useful is it? Is the experience with SQL Operations Studio the same as SQL Server Management Studio? If you’re new to SQL Server development, how could it be improved? What other Redgate tools should we consider developing for cross-platform use?

Answers to questions like these will help us help you improve your database development, so take part in shaping our future plans for SQL Operations Studio. We’re always available to talk, either by email, or via the red chat link on the Foundry Labs page.