Microsoft to retire Azure Data Studio soon: at the end of February 2026

Microsoft recently announced that they are going to stop developing the separate database management/maintenance application called Azure Data Studio or ADS. This tool has been available for quite a while, but now it's time to start working with Visual Studio Code instead + suitable extensions.

The interesting thing here is that Azure Data Studio was built on the technology of Visual Studio Code (VSC), but apparently, the codebase wasn't suitable for integrating the features back to VSC.

If you are using ADS to manage for example SQL Server databases, then you can move to VSC and the MSSQL extension. It provides similar functionality, but is currently in preview.

Availability of Azure Data Studio will cease at the end of February 2026. That is, in about a year from now.