I've been using various tools to work with SQL Server for a few decades. I was comfortable with Query Analyzer and a variety of tools in SQL Server 4.2, but quickly warmed up to  Enterprise Manager in SQL Server 6. When Management Studio came along, I was a bit dismayed, and briefly turned to a few third party tools to manage my servers and run queries. However, SSMS improved over the years, and much of the tool has become second nature for me.

At the PASS Summit recently, Microsoft unveiled the SQL Operations Studio. This is the next iteration of SQL Server tooling, based on the project Carbon. This is a fork of VS Code, and it feels very VS Code-ish. I have been playing with various builds for quite a few months, alternately pleased with the progress and annoyed by things that don't work like SSMS. Perhaps the lack of ALT+X/CTRL+E to execute queries is the big one, but overall the look and feel are odd for me. Maybe I'm too used to SSMS, but I didn't feel that some of the other SQL editors felt odd. VS Code does at times, and this carries into SOS.

The public availability of the product in preview was released Wednesday at Microsoft's Connect event. It's cross platform, so OSX and Linux users and use it from their systems. I'd urge you to give it a try and see what you think. Perhaps many of you will like the tool more than I will and it will grow and succeed. I've already seen some blogs this week that discuss the IDE and I expect to see more over time.

SOS. That's a funny acronym, at least to me. Is there a subliminal message that this will save us? Or maybe that we'll need saving with yet another tool to take this one's place? I have no idea, but I'm surprised that marketing came up with this but I suspect like many marketing people, they assume everyone will use the name, not the acronym. You'd think marketing people would learn that acronyms matter. I've seen this referred to as MSOS, but I'm not sure that will catch on.

I still think it's got a funny name, but it's not the worse one out there. I'm sure a few of you can think of other acronyms that didn't do their product, or the developers that should be proud of their work, any favors.