Last month, Microsoft announced new Azure tools and infrastructure improvements at its Inspire 2020 event. A few days later, the tech giant unveiled NFS 3.0 support for its Azure Blob storage service. Today, the latest version of Azure Data Studio has been released, with the introduction of Notebook improvements, a new Jupyter Books picker feature, and more.
The changelog for this month reads as follows:
- Notebook improvements.
- Move cells.
- Convert cells.
- Jupyter Books picker.
- Notebook search experience.
- Bug fixes
For starters, two new capabilities have been introduced in the cell toolbar, including arrow key icons to change the ordering of cells, and a separate option to convert cells from text cells to code blocks and vice versa. The aforementioned are features that have already been available for a while in standard Jupyter environments, such as Google's Colab, so it is not much of a surprise that they are being brought to Notebooks in Data Studio as well.
Moving on, a new capability to find and load remote Jupyter Notebooks with ease has been added. The notebook viewlet now has a "Add Remote Jupyter Book" option, which shows a dialogue box when accessed. This allows users to directly choose from among pre-defined locations such as GitHub to quickly load the relevant repositories.
And finally, the search experience in Notebooks has also been enhanced, with a more dynamic way to locate specific content. All Notebooks listed in the viewlet can be sifted through with a single search, with search results marking out all relevant Notebooks, as showcased in the image above.
The full list of bug fixes made in the August release can be viewed here. The latest version of Azure Data Studio can be downloaded here, while exact release notes have been made available here.
