
The icons used to represent operators were all different from the icons that people were used to from working with SSMS. But I would severely hesitate to call it serious support. There has, indeed, always been support for viewing execution plans in ADS.

If ADS wants to be a serious tool for the serious developer, then it must have serious support for working with execution plans. Both roles should be able to access the execution plan of a query. Query tuning is, in my opinion, part of the job of both DBAs and developers.
Azure data studio vs ssms windows#
But a developer will rejoice at having a tool that doesn’t require Windows but also runs natively on Linux or macOS, and that connects to almost every data provider instead of just SQL Server and Azure SQL databases. A DBA will notice that lots of actions typically associated with their job of database administration have no or very limited support in the GUI, though they can of course still be done with T-SQL statements in a query window. This tool seems to be mostly targeted towards developers. The alternative is Azure Data Studio (ADS).

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is for many people still the default choice it used to be included with a SQL Server installation, it is the most familiar tool for most SQL Server professionals, it gives easy access to (almost) all SQL Server features, and it’s simply the interface we have been used to for as long as we’ve been working with SQL Server. Microsoft has two main tools for querying and managing SQL Server databases in a graphical UI.
