Azure Data Studio Should Support Analysis Services And Power BI Premium Capacities

I’m at the PASS Summit this week, and in this morning’s keynote there was a demo of the newly-released Azure Data Studio  – a modern, cross-platform tool for managing and querying SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and other Azure data services (it’s carefully described as “complementary to” SQL Server Management Studio rather than a replacement for it; this blog post has a detailed discussion of this question).

This video is provides a good, short overview of what it is:

I think it’s pretty cool, BUT… it doesn’t support Analysis Services. I had a moan about this and the generally poor state of Analysis Services tooling on Twitter, was invited to meet some of the developers and was told that if enough people request Analysis Services support it might happen.

What would support for Analysis Services involve? The following springs to mind:

• I’d like to be able to connect to and manage Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular on-premises and Azure Analysis Services; if that’s too ambitious I could settle for supporting only Analysis Services Tabular 2016+ and Azure Analysis Services.
• Since we will soon be able to connect to a Power BI Premium capacity as if it was an Analysis Services instance via XMLA endpoints, I would want to be able to connect to Power BI Premium capacity too.
• I’d want to be able to run DAX and M queries, and ideally MDX queries too.
• I would also want to be able to work with ASSL and TMSL for scripting and editing objects.
• Azure Data Studio has a Profiler extension that works on xEvents; it would be great if that worked with Analysis Services xEvents too.
• DAX and M Jupyter notebooks would be really useful!
• It would make sense for some of the functionality of existing tools like DAX Studio and BISM Normalizer being turned into extensions.

If you want to see Analysis Services support in Azure Data Studio, go to the following issue on the Azure Data Studio GitHub repository:

https://github.com/Microsoft/azuredatastudio/issues/1026

…and click the thumbs-up icon on the first post:

Let’s make our voices heard!