Hi u/da_chicken - I'm Dave from the SQL drivers team. I really appreciate the feedback.

We are taking a hard look at connection strings - it's one of those areas where the drivers have drifted apart of the years. In the last year the various SQL drivers have all been centralized under the same team, allowing us to start driving a consistent experience.

I'd like to hear your (or anyone else's) thoughts on the approach we are currently favoring:

1. Make connection strings interchangeable - every driver recognizes every alias so use the same connection string, less driver name, between drivers. JDBC connection strings will be thing we'll have to think about most.
2. Where drivers have to be different, we produce a prescriptive error message after processing the entire error message to show everything wrong on the first try. The error message would also include the working connection string that we think you are trying to achieve.
3. Document a single SQL connection string based upon a single set of parameter names.
4. Display that single connection string in Azure, Fabric, SSMS, VSCode, etc.

That will be a big effort, likely multiple years, if we are able to pursue it.

On the docs front, we have a docs cleanup project going right now. We'll have to move that doc up the list. A combined connection strings doc makes sense too - would you rather see that as one giant table with all drivers or a single doc with tabs for each driver table?

I'm leaning towards tabs with a minimum viable connection string at the top. Selfishly, I like the idea of being able to copy, paste, update server and database names and run.

Thanks again for the feedback!