Add the ability to cancel a running query to the Data Explorer

Question

Would it be possible to have a "cancel" button somewhere while the "Hold tight while we fetch your results..." text is being displayed?

The thing is, I occasionally (rarely, very rarely!) make a mistake.

Specifically, sometimes I click "Run Query" in the Data Explorer, and then immediately realize I've left something out, or misspelled something in a WHERE clause, etc - some simple mistake.

Considering the timeout for queries is 2 minutes, that can be rather frustrating (especially while tweaking a complicated query). It would be great to be able to cancel that query, make the quick fix, and resubmit.

I'd be okay with the "cancel" button not being available until a certain amount of time had passed without results from the query (5, 10, 15 seconds? Anything less than 2 minutes, I suppose).

_{Oh, and Tim Stone can't complain about this, because it was totally his idea.}

Answer 1

Sam had already done the hard work of making the query run as an asynchronous process, so I just went ahead and hacked something together to allow for user cancellation. The feature works with the following points in mind:

• The cancel button isn't enabled until after the first poll for results
• If your query has already executed and is in the process of returning results, you'll get the results back anyway
• If your query has multiple sections (split by GO, for instance) and you cancel it after some of those sections have completed, you'll get the results of those sections where applicable
• There's a slight chance that if you cancel a query that would have caused the server to throw an exception, you might not get that error message (hopefully unlikely)

In the typical case where you just have a single query that you're cancelling before it's gotten to the result set processing stage, you get a message like the following:

Note that your execution of the query is still logged even when you cancel the process, to monitor for abuse.

Thanks for turning this into an actual request to prompt me to get it taken care of!