Happy T-SQL Tuesday! Number 127. Wow. Over 10 and a half years. Talk about incredible. I’m actually hosting this time and I wanted to see some non SQL tips and tricks. As luck would have it I had already been thinking about writing about the Azure Portal search bar and since it’s not SQL and I personally think it’s pretty handy I going to use it for this post.
First of all what is the portal. This is the GUI tool that Microsoft provides to work with Azure itself. Note: There is an app version as well as a web browser version. And at the top of said GUI there is a search bar.
Now, there are lots of search bars out there. Heck, almost every web page I’ve ever seen has one. So what makes this one special? Several things. First of all the basic object search:
A simple search for 2019 immediately (and I mean it’s fast) came up with a list of all of my resources with 2019 in the name. Not to mention a sampling of what’s available in the marketplace, documentation, services and resource groups on the same search. The nice thing here is that even at my office, which is a large enterprise, I can be given the name of a VM, Azure SQL DB, Synapse DB, etc and do a quick search and find it. Note: For all I usually find it to be very fast, sometimes it does take a few seconds or longer for whatever I’ve needed to pop up.
So now how about I do a search for sql database
This time I have a list of all of the services available in Azure with the sql database in the name, along with entries in the marketplace and documentation. I can use this to very quickly navigate to a service I want, or whatever else I need. You’ll also notice that if there are more options available than will fit in the list you have a See all option.
Clicking on the one next to Documentation takes me to a search of the Microsoft documentation.
And again, it’s one of the fastest searches I’ve seen.
Now, how about if I don’t enter a search? If I just click in the bar I still get help.
Just a simple click and I get my search history (nothing unusual there I guess), a list of all of the recent services I’ve used (if you’re like me you probably only bounce between a few) and the recent resources I’ve used (and see, there’s another see more).
This is probably the first search bar that I’ve used on a regular basis and that saves me significant amounts of time. Well, I mean excluding Google and Bing.