A Better Developer Experience With Our Enhanced SQL Editor: Tabs, Autocomplete and More

As we've evolved our data platform, we've learned an important lesson: while notebooks offer powerful capabilities for data analysis, many of our users continue to prefer the simplicity and familiarity of a dedicated SQL editor.

Rather than forcing users to adapt to a single workflow, we've listened to your feedback and invested in significant improvements to our SQL editor experience.

The SQL editor is here to stay

Despite our initial hypothesis that notebooks might eventually replace traditional SQL editors, our user data told a different story. Many of our power users continued to rely heavily on the SQL editor for their daily workflows — something further confirmed through interviews with some of our largest customers.

As one of our customers explained: "The SQL editor gives me a clean, focused environment for writing and executing queries without the overhead of notebooks. For pure SQL work, it's still my go-to editor."

This feedback prompted us to double down on the work that our engineering team members were already passionate about improving. These are some of the best ideas to come out of hackathons that resulted in a push to better the SQL editor experience that we're excited to share today.

Multi-tab SQL editor: Organize your work

One of the most requested features has been the ability to work with multiple SQL files simultaneously across tabs. We're thrilled to announce this capability is now generally available!

Key features

Create and manage multiple SQL files within a single browser session
Load, edit and run different queries against different workspaces and databases in the same browser tab
Save individual SQL files for future reference and reuse

The multi-tab interface solves one of the biggest pain points we heard from users: the tendency for a single SQL editor page to become cluttered with hundreds — or thousands — of lines of unrelated queries. Now you can organize your work logically, keeping related queries together while maintaining separate tabs for different projects or analyses.

Never lose your work

We've also implemented safeguards to protect your work:

Edit history is preserved with 5-second interval autosaves
Closing confirmation for modified tabs prevents accidental data loss

Example use case

1. Click on create new SQL file in the Data Studio tab.

2. An untitled-n.sql file is created where you can write your SQL queries.

3. Choosing to close the SQL tab prompts a warning to save your changes.

4. Click on the save button here, or the save as button to take you to naming your SQL file.

5. Confirm the name and click save. This will save your file in the personal folder, which you can find listed in the Data Studio personal files page.

6. Feel free to create more SQL files and have them open in multiple tabs.