This is a very useful feature of ADS that has also been in SSMS for years. It should definitely be supported by the VS Code extension. Should probably mark this issue with ADS Retirement and Enhancement labels.

A very useful feature indeed, especially when working with a large number of databases for multiple customers and/or applications. Also it would be very welcome to be able to import existing Azure Data Studio server groups and connections in VSCode.

It looks like this is planned for February 2025: #1761 (ok, to be honest it's postponned since October 2024 release 😅)
Not exactly the same way used in Azure Data Studio, but another way to group connections by context.

yes please

And with the possibility to color the tabs per group.
✨ Very valuable to mark tabs with connections against prod-environment!

Because of sunsetting Azure Data Studio the VSCode MSSQL extension should have a feature to migrate stored database connections from ADS into VSCode in automated manner.

In our org with 50+ SQL Servers it would be horrible to do it manually for each dev.

Because of sunsetting Azure Data Studio the VSCode MSSQL extension should have a feature to migrate stored database connections from ADS into VSCode in automated manner.

In our org with 50+ SQL Servers it would be horrible to do it manually for each dev.

Yeah i opened an issue on it #18661 but unfortunately it was closed as a dupe even though 'supporting' server groups and allowing an import from azure data studio are different things :(. Haven't heard anything unfortunately but i'm hopeful they'll respond at some point.

We added this to 1.33.0, our June 2025 release! Please check it out!

We added this to 1.33.0, our June 2025 release! Please check it out!

Server groups are nice, thank you! But the tabs are not getting the colour of the server group - one issues requesting this feature (e.g. #703) is closed and another feature requests (#1684 and #18865) are still open with no comments since Apr 8. Is this also on the roadmap somewhere or is it really not possible?

@skyflyer There's currently no official/supported way to change the status bar background or the tab styling. Over in Azure Data Studio, we had modified the VS Code core that we'd forked in order to add support for this.

Looking at the various extensions that do colorization of these areas, they're all using various hacky workarounds that I'm not comfortable with:

• Tabs color patches your VS Code installation to add the necessary hooks, doesn't necessarily work on Mac or Linux, doesn't work in environments where you don't have write-access to the VS Code installation, and triggers a warning about installation corruption.
• ColorTabs and VSCode Vim both work by constantly writing to your workspace config, which results in significant performance degredation and this warning:

  ⚠️ There are performance implications to using this plugin. In order to change the status bar, we override the configurations in your workspace settings.json which results in increased latency and a constant changing diff in your working directory

We'd be happy to add this functionality once VS Code officially supports either tab coloration (currently not supported) or freeform background coloration for status bar items (currently restricted to only warning and error colors).

One option that we may be able to use is to change the foreground (text color) of the connection info in the status bar, but it would then be up to the user to choose colors that are visible in their selected theme. What do you think of that?

Long-standing VS Code issue here:
microsoft/vscode#31308

@match-gabeflores upvoted. Might need to be a community contribution.

@match-gabeflores thanks for the link! upvoted also.

@Benjin no chance you could ninja walk down to one of the MS buildings where the VSCode team reside and chat to their PM about that issue to see if it could be thrown in a roadmap ? 🙏🏻

@Benjin, thank you so much for your elaborate answer. I appreciate it.

@skyflyer There's currently no official/supported way to change the status bar background or the tab styling. Over in Azure Data Studio, we had modified the VS Code core that we'd forked in order to add support for this.

Looking at the various extensions that do colorization of these areas, they're all using various hacky workarounds that I'm not comfortable with:

• Tabs color patches your VS Code installation to add the necessary hooks, doesn't necessarily work on Mac or Linux, doesn't work in environments where you don't have write-access to the VS Code installation, and triggers a warning about installation corruption.
• ColorTabs and VSCode Vim both work by constantly writing to your workspace config, which results in significant performance degredation and this warning:

  ⚠️ There are performance implications to using this plugin. In order to change the status bar, we override the configurations in your workspace settings.json which results in increased latency and a constant changing diff in your working directory

We'd be happy to add this functionality once VS Code officially supports either tab coloration (currently not supported) or freeform background coloration for status bar items (currently restricted to only warning and error colors).

One option that we may be able to use is to change the foreground (text color) of the connection info in the status bar, but it would then be up to the user to choose colors that are visible in their selected theme. What do you think of that?

I think that your proposed change to colorize the server/database label in the status bar would be a good effort until tab colorization is possible in the main vscode project. Agreed, you'd have to pick font colors that matched the theme, but that would at least give you some way. Alternately, instead of colorizing the text, maybe you put a glyph like a bullet/square there before the server/database name and colorize that. Even the slightest visual indicator would be helpful.