The February 2021 release of Azure Data Studio is now available
The February release of Azure Data Studio is now available. Download Azure Data Studio and review the release notes to get started.
Azure Data Studio is a multi-database, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the Microsoft family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, macOS, and Linux. To learn more, visit our GitHub.
The key highlights to cover this month include:
- Added new notebook improvements
- Added improvements to Azure Arc extension.
- New extension updates.
- Bug Fixes.
For a list of complete updates, refer to the Azure Data Studio release notes.
Added new notebook improvements
Start-up time performance improvements
When first launching Azure Data Studio, it can take a long time for the Jupyter server to start running. We found this to be an issue on Windows, so with the February release of Azure Data Studio, you will experience up to a 50 percent improvement on Jupyter Server start-up time. This allows you to start creating and editing your Jupyter notebooks even faster.
Edit Jupyter Book through UI
As users are trying out Jupyter Books, which is a collection of Jupyter notebooks organized by a table of contents, users are looking for easy customization through UI-guided experiences. Users found it painful to update a .yml file in order to organize the Jupyter Book in the order that they wanted.
With the February release of Azure Data Studio, you no longer need to mess with a .yml file.
In the notebooks viewlet, you can now right-click a notebook or section in a Jupyter Book and move it to the correct location. The right-click option will take you to the quick picker that auto-detects all sections inside the Jupyter Book.
This quality of life feature was a highly requested feature, and we are happy to bring this to customers with the February release.
Preview of passing parameters through URI
With the February release, users can now pass parameters through notebook URI directly in Azure Data Studio.
New parameterization documentation
In a previous release, we announced Papermill parameterization support in Azure Data Studio. We now have updated documentation so you can start using parameterization yourself. Try it out now.
Added improvements to Azure Arc extension
Since the preview, the Azure Arc extension has continued to add new functionality. With the February release, users can now support multiple data controllers. This now gives you a flexible experience to view all the data controllers you want to connect and manage.
We have also added a new option in the connection dialog to ask for a Kube configuration file path to connect to a controller.
New extension updates
With this release, we have pushed out new versions of the following extensions. If you have not tried out these extensions before, check out each extension’s documentation and try it out.
Bug fixes
As mentioned in the previous blog, we are focusing on fundamentals and driving the bug count down across the product. In February, we have fixed 51 bugs. A full list of bug fixes for the February release can be found here.
If you would like to help make Azure Data Studio a great product, please share any feedback or report issues through our Issues page. Our engineering team is regularly going through the untriaged issues and assigning issues into different monthly milestones so that you know we are working on it. Your votes on issues help us prioritize.
Contact us
If you have any feature requests or issues, please submit them to our GitHub issues page. For any questions, feel free to comment below or tweet us @AzureDataStudio.
