Azure Query Editor

By Joshua Higginbotham on November 17, 2019 • ( Leave a comment )

In preview for awhile now, we have additional capabilities of accessing our data in Azure without having to use SSMS or Azure Data Studio to query the data. This tool is called the Query Editor and allows us to query our Azure SQL Databases from the portal. This additional accessibility opens up the opportunity for us to access our data even from our phone or tablet devices if the need ever arose. To access this feature, we first need to login in the portal and access our collection of SQL Databases.

Once we’ve logged in and located the SQL Databases section of the portal. We can then select our database that we want to access.

Once we’ve selected our database, we will see a list of options in the left pane. In the first section of the list we will see the Query Editor (Preview) tab.

The next screen will prompt us to enter a SQL Database login and password or to establish a connection using our Azure Active Directory Account used to sign into the portal. For this example, we will use a SQL Login to access the Query Editor.

For those of you that are security conscious, any device that you attempt to access the database from this option, still requires that its IP Address be configured through the firewall to access the system.

Once logged in we will see the Query Editor screen, which looks similar in nature to the other Query tool options that we’ve used in the past. This makes the process fairly intuitive and allows for us to get to work without the need of a long familiarization.

In a first run through, we can see that we get a similar intellisense from the query editor that we see in SSMS now. If you’ve ever lost the ability to use intellisense you’ll know the importance of having this functionality.

So now that we have our heads around the query editor, let’s run a query. We can write just about anything that you would in SSMS in the query editor pane. However, key mappings that we find in SSMS are not present here. So no F5 for quick executions sadly.