It still feels funny to say that a major feature in a database product is the user interface, but I’m feeling a lot less awkward about saying that about the new studio now.

The obvious change here is that it is using HTML5, and not Silverlight. That alone would be great, because Silverlight has gotten pretty annoying, but we have actually done much more that. We moved to HTML5 and we added a lot of new features.

Here is how this looks like:

Now, let me show you some of the new stuff. None of it is ground breaking on its own, but combined they create a vastly improved experience.

Indexes copy/paste allows you to easily transfer index definitions from one database to another, without requiring any external tools.

Also on indexing, we have the format index feature, which can take a nasty index and turn that into a pretty and more easily understood code:

Speaking of code and indexing, did you notice the C# button there? Clicking on that will give you this:

Like the copy/paste index feature, the idea is that you can modify the index on the studio, play with the various options, then you hit this button and you can copy working index creation code into your project and don’t worry any more about how you are going to deploy it.

We also added some convenience factors, such as computed columns.  Let us see how that works. Here is the default view of the employees in the Northwind database:

that is nice, but it seems complex to me, all I care about is the full name and the age. So I head to the settings and define a few common functions:

I then head back to the employees collection and click on the grid icon at the header row, which gives me this:

After pressing “Save as default”, I can see that the values shown for employees are:

You can also do the same for the results of specific queries or indexes, so you’ll have better experience looking at the data. The custom functions also serve additional roles, but I’ll touch them on a future post.

Speaking of queries, here is how they look like:

Note the Excel icon on the top, you can export the data directly to Excel now. This is common if you need to send it to a colleague or anyone in the business side of things. For that matter, you can also load data into RavenDB from a CSV file:

There is actually a lot of stuff that goes on in the studio, but I won’t talk about it now, replication tracking, better metrics, etc. I’ll talk about them in posts specific for the major bundles and a post (or posts) about better operations support.

I’ll leave you with one final feature, the map reduce visualizer:

More posts are coming .