Announcing SQL Server on Linux

I for one am excited to hear about this move and was wondering if it would ever happen. This will help keep SQL Server alive and growing (I think) and who knows, maybe bits and pieces will even become open source some day (that&#x27;s optimistic perhaps).<p>I am an equal opportunity consumer of database technology - something we all should be (e.g. use the right tool for the job when appropriate). I have used MANY different databases, open source and commercial, and there are better ones and worse ones across the spectrum. I think it is naive to criticize this move in any way - it is giving more choice so should be supported.<p>That said, SQL Server has a low barrier to entry, a very good implementation of the SQL language, an advanced optimizer, strong storage engine, management tools and a lot of nice BI features. Although you don&#x27;t hear about it much, SQL Server also has Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) which is their MPP database - ironically which used to be built using Ingres and Java of all things.<p>In my experience, SQL Server &lt;-&gt; PostgreSQL is the closest commercial to open source comparison (core database engine-wise) I can think of. This makes sense when you consider - both of them started as Ingres! Of course, Postgres and SQL Server have totally different user experiences (database management, tooling, etc.) and many different features.

I work on a software product that supports MySQL, PgSQL and SqlServer (if they run it on Windows, since we only support the official Windows PHP drivers).<p>SqlServer has always been the best performing and least troublesome database in terms of weird edge cases, backup, restoration, and (especially!) performing expensive SELECTS on databases that have grown into the 100&#x27;s of Gigabytes in size.<p>Based on my experience, for all the (often deserved) hate on M$, SqlServer is really a shining star.<p>That being said, I am a little scared to support SqlServer on Linux, as I imagine it will have to be different in quite some potentially fundamental ways to work on Linux - I&#x27;d love to hear if anyone has opinions on that aspect.

From <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;microsoft-is-porting-sql-server-to-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;microsoft-is-porting-sql-server...</a> -<p>&quot;The spokesperson also acknowledged that Microsoft won&#x27;t be bringing all of the same capabilities in SQL Server 2016 to Linux; it will be just the &quot;core relational database capabilities.&quot;<p>As somewhat expected this will be a limited release catering mostly to cloud customers (Azure in particular) - who knows down the road they will port all features to Linux including the UI management tools but I would be surprised if they don&#x27;t keep the niche features Windows-only.<p>Welcome announcement anyway - having a supported mainstream DB other than Oracle on Linux is a good thing.

I would never use SQL server willingly but I really like the direction Microsoft is taking lately. They are a software company and restricting their software to PCs running Windows only doesn&#x27;t make sense.

It&#x27;s taken a ton of years, but here we are:<p>&quot;If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I&#x27;ve won.&quot; -Linus Torvalds

For years I told my boss: &quot;I&#x27;d love to use SQL Server like you suggested, but it doesn&#x27;t run on Linux&quot;.<p>Now I&#x27;m finished.

Can someone tell me why I would want to use SQL Server when there are so many robust and free RDBMS available on Linux?

I&#x27;m genuinely worried now. I&#x27;ll have to thumb through the Book of Revelation again, but I&#x27;m pretty sure MSSQL on Linux and Donald Trump possibly becoming the next President are two of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I&#x27;m very interested to hear some of the details about how the storage engine was ported to Linux. One of the advantages of SQL Server was how well it exploited the Windows overlapped I&#x2F;O model for disk access. When running large selects, backups, or restores, SQL Server always uses the full bandwidth of my disk subsystem. When I built a prototype of my application on PostgreSQL (which I would much rather run for its free licenses and more mature indexing), I had to tweak all kinds of things to get it to use the full bandwidth of my disk system and I was not always successful.

For anyone unaware, SQL Server is a &#x27;fork&#x27; of Sybase after an agreement between Sybase and Microsoft ended in 1993. At that point, &quot;Sybase SQL Server version 4.2 and Microsoft SQL Server are identical.&quot;<p>Sybase runs happily on Unix, Linux or Windows.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sybase" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sybase</a>

I&#x27;ve used a lot of databases over the past 25 years. From DBase flat files to the Borland Database Engine to MSSQL (pre and post 2K), Interbase &#x2F; Firebird, DB2, PostgreSQL, MySql&#x2F;MariaDb, Sqlite and more. I haven&#x27;t used MSSQL in a few years and had to dive back into it for an integration project. Oh my, I forgot how user unfriendly it is.<p>I can&#x27;t call a stored procedure from a select query? Ok, write a user-defined wrapper function. Oh wait, I can&#x27;t call a stored procedure from there either. Now I know why the consultants use a VBA script in Excel to load data... it&#x27;s actually the easiest way, ridiculously convoluted as it is, if your logic is implemented as stored procedures.<p>I remember the first time I wrote a stored procedure in PostgreSQL. It was the point at which I decided I would never willingly choose MSSQL for a project again. If you write a lot of stored procedures &#x2F; TSQL in MS SQL Server, do yourself a favor and check out how it is done in PostgreSQL. It&#x27;s an order of magnitude simpler and saner.

Time to invite that girl again for a date (that one that said that hell would freeze before she would accept my invitation).

Errr, how exactly does this work? What&#x27;s the underlying technology that makes it possible?

The three best Microsoft products are their natural keyboard, the mice and SQL Server. Now all of them work with my OS.

I never thought I&#x27;d see this happen, but it turns out to be quite a pleasant surprise. I know it&#x27;s already possible to run ASP.Net on Linux via Apache, so this is the next logical step.<p>I&#x27;m quite impressed by the possibility of running SQL Server on Linux; as a T-SQL developer immediately out of university, I have come to appreciate its speed and efficiency. It&#x27;s not perfect and it does have its annoying quirks, but in general it&#x27;s quite a sturdy RDBMS. MySQL has demonstrated some much more WTF-y quirks (try inserting a varchar into an int column!) and there are places I prefer T-SQL syntax (e.g. temp tables). Management tools don&#x27;t really factor into it, you can get third-party tools that support intellisense etc. on different RDBMSs. In short, I would have few reservations about using SQL Server for my own projects (since I run exclusively Linux at home).<p>Licensing is another story though; I dread to think how much it&#x27;ll cost, but this is a pretty amazing step in the right direction, adding to a recent history of such steps, for Microsoft.

The first thing that comes to mind with this announcement is about SQLServer drivers for non-Windows platforms. Years ago, it was all but impossible to talk to &quot;DataCenter&quot; SQLServer from anything but Windows. Apparently, the connection URI was a configuration endpoint and the driver was responsible for switching between active masters. This meant that a simple ODBC driver wouldn&#x27;t work as there was no real endpoint to connect to. A real Linux driver would be great; an open source one would be outstanding!<p>NOTE: This type of thing is what made me hate Microsoft for so long, and even today I find it difficult to recommend them as a solution provider for anything, on any platform. So, while I&#x27;m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, I&#x27;ll continue working to move everything I can, including databases, to another platform.

Seems quite insular to call it just &quot;SQL Server&quot;. We already have Postgres SQL Server, MySql SQL Server, etc. They should call it &quot;Microsoft SQL Server&quot;.

I have a lot of negative feelings about Microsoft because of the historical baggage but they have some good products and technologies. I am also fairly negative on Oracle but when they released their database on Linux it was important for me at the time as it gave a boost to Linux server work (now with added DBA).<p>There is a lot of software that targets a limited subset of databases due to SQL incompatibilities&#x2F;features and sometimes that is a subset of one. Getting some of those backends on Linux would be nice for people who have concentrated on unix&#x2F;linux skills to the detriment of their Windows knowledge.<p>This eats Windows OS sales to some extent but I am sure they can make it up with database licenses and market share if they take the product seriously.

I&#x27;ve always had this question and this looks like my chance to ask it. If you are developing new software today why on earth would you use SQL server? Is the price tag justified over the many free and open source alternatives?

This would never happen if Steve Ballmer was still alive.

This is huge and I wonder if this now means that they&#x27;ll also bring other products to Linux such as Microsoft Power BI. It would definitely make sense in light of this announcement.

Every time there&#x27;s an announcement like this, I like to remember back to the campaign of FUD that MS peddled against Linux. I think Ballmer once called the OS a &quot;cancer&quot;.

This is really exciting. I choose Postgres for side projects and new consulting work.<p>But there are often times when you just don&#x27;t have a choice. Sometimes it&#x27;s SQL Server or bust, and you have to work with it. Hell, sometimes, it&#x27;s MySQL, and you don&#x27;t have a choice.<p>I don&#x27;t hate it at all. I wish it had more of the PL parts of PL&#x2F;SQL because that would make my life sometimes easier.<p>I had to implement some very crazy&#x2F;stupid statistical procedures with SQL Server. It kind of sucked in ways that would have been a lot better in Postgres.<p>Lots and lots of fun with dynamic SQL where you&#x27;re stuffing SQL into variables and interpolating column names from variables into those strings.<p>It was awful. But it worked.<p>If SQL Server would bring in even some of the PL features of Postgres or Oracle, I would use in a heartbeat.<p>The tooling that MS provides for SQL Server is second to none. I love me some open source, but the tooling we have available for Postgres and MySQL is just absolute crap compared to SSMS.

Is Microsoft deliberately trying to end Windows as a back end server? What is the underlying strategic outcome that makes this a good idea for Microsoft?<p>BTW if you reply to this comment with a &quot;Microsoft smackdown&quot; comment then your comment is not very interesting.<p>I&#x27;m interested to hear some thoughtful replies, not Linux fanboy pile-on and jeering.

I don&#x27;t get many predictions right, but 3 years ago I stated to a group of colleagues: &quot;By 2019, Microsoft will be the largest open-source software company on the planet.&quot; Yes, I deserved the laughs I received.<p>Not sure about the accuracy of my prediction, but I&#x27;ll bet I&#x27;m closer to right than wrong by that time.

I remember when Oracle became available for Linux - that was the beginning of a new era in terms of the legitimacy it conferred on Linux. (Yes, I know, Oracle the company sucks, but that&#x27;s tangential to this particular discussion).<p>I wonder if this is the beginning of a similar change in the industry.

Someone page Vinod Valloppillil[0] for a quote on this one. Anyone know if he&#x27;s still in the industry?<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halloween_documents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halloween_documents</a>

I just started a job where mssql is used extensively. They&#x27;re trying to get a PHP 7 application off the ground and the lack of a mssql driver (non-PDO) for PHP 7 is a big pain point. As of Jan 2016, they had released a beta release and were taking a poll on what platform they should support next (I&#x27;m not kidding, the entire history is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;msphpsql&#x2F;issues&#x2F;58" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;msphpsql&#x2F;issues&#x2F;58</a>). Unfortunately it seems support is secondary in this case to Microsoft, as they are unable or unwilling to allocate the necessary resources

Maybe my secret hope of Exchange on Linux isn&#x27;t completely insane after all...

&gt; In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x<p>Can&#x27;t wait to try this one, a Redis-like service with all the consistency of a mature SQL database (in theory at least).<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;ve being deploying Redis in production and I&#x27;m love with it, but it&#x27;s nice to have an alternative with referential integrity not to mention the &quot;isomorphic&quot; effect (you&#x27;ll be able to switch from non-volatile to volatile persistence without the wizardry required by the typical in-memory databases).

I wonder if SSMS tools are going to go crossplat like VSCODE?<p>How great would it be to have first-class sql-server-management-studio on your Mac&#x2F;Linux desktop?<p>I wonder if SqlExpress is going to be available on Linux too?

I find this really weird for the following reason.<p>Only cost conscious developers care about running db server on the same machine as application server to keep costs low. Such people wont buy SQL Server at all for the cost related reasons.<p>Non cost conscious developers can always run SQL Server on a separate Windows machine while keeping their application servers on Linux.<p>Except Microsoft intends to make SQL Server free and make it replace Mysql among small developers and later help them buy SQL Server instances in cloud and make money.

Microsoft, you devil! That is awesome news. It will definitely push others to up their db game. One thing is DB engine, other is a suite of tools that goes along with it.

I really love developing on sql server, but...<p>From memory I remember when they &quot;acquired&quot; the source from Sybase and one of the selling points was that they could strip out all the multi-platform complexity from the source code. Being windows-only meant it was simpler, less complex code, faster and less buggy.<p>It also confuses my view of what MS has been doing. Maybe Azure is more important than Windows now? Its going to be kinda weird to see SQL Server on Linux in Azure.

This is another awesome piece of news!<p>If you&#x27;re interested in using docker+.NetCore+EF a &quot;proper&quot; database was the only piece missing.

Awesome :) Now a days Microsoft changed a lot, welcome to the new world (Linux). The raise of NoSql, how MS SQL survived ! amazing.

Does anyone know if this potentially includes a replacement for FreeTDS. A replacement would mean open source in this context.

They mentioned a preview available today, but I&#x27;m not seeing it on the Partner or MSDN portals. Anybody got a link?

Having worked as a Windows admin for the the past three years, the one piece of Microsoft technology that never gave me the least bit of trouble is SQL Server. It&#x27;s expensive (compared to the € 0,- price tag of PostgreSQL), but otherwise I like it very much. It will be interesting to see SQL Server on Linux.

Even as recently as a year ago this would pass as a great April Fools joke. Boy how have the times changed.

I don&#x27;t really know why I would choose to use sql server if I wasn&#x27;t already locked in to MS as a vendor. Is the idea that it gives people the ability to move away from MS if they already have vendor lock in? Or is it to hopefully compete against eg Oracle.

I am incredibly excited. This is the first step towards a docker version of SQL Server which for our company would enable us so many options to improve developers lives. Even if we stay with Windows for production SQL deployments, this will make development awesome.

The reason this has my attention is because &#x27;R&#x27; is being integrated into the engine.

Never really found a GUI I liked as much as MSSQL (not that you always need it, but it&#x27;s nice!) - though I&#x27;m really in love with postgres - I&#x27;ve sometimes found myself just thinking &quot;why doesn&#x27;t everyone do it like this&quot;.

Why Microsoft needs SQL Server on Linux <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-microsoft-needs-sql-server-on-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-microsoft-needs-sql-server-...</a>

Is SQL Server Management Studio available on Linux? Is there anything like it on Linux?

MSSQL actually is really mature and performant (on par with Oracle) and I&#x27;m interested to see some benchmarks vs MySQL and PostGRES. I think it could become the replacement for SQL enterprise, even over the widely loved PostGRES.

Just the other day I was discussing with some folks that Microsoft has made an amazing effort of the last two years to win back the hearts and minds of developers. This is another great step in that direction.

Just have to say, it is great to see Microsoft turning again into a software company! Even after all the hate, they do great products and good stable software. A great example of a successful software company.

I wonder if the UI management tools will be web-based like GCloud&#x2F;AWS&#x2F;Azure, or if they will be OS-specific. Still, it&#x27;s very impressive that Microsoft is moving outside its own OS.

this will make it much more available to containerized stacks for sure.

Can&#x27;t wait to see benchmarks of this on same config hardware :D

I&#x27;ve always enjoyed using SQL Server and I&#x27;m really happy about how it&#x27;s grown over the years in features and performance. I really never thought this day would come.

Ok, good. Now how much a SQL Server on Linux license is going to cost ? Does it mean businesses using Linux will now be subject to Microsoft license audits ?

The question now is, will they offer up a free edition to compete with MySQL? And when will they open-source it?<p>(I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m actually saying that.)

With this trend, I will not be surprised if Microsoft releases its own Linux distro which will be optimized for MS software (e.g. sql server)

of course, the major downside to this is that linux admins will now have the possibility that they have to work with sql server

I bet a lot of Microsoft&#x27;s push to Linux is that something like 98% of the internet runs on non-windows OS&#x27;s.

May not have been as hard to port as you all think. SQL Server was a port of Sybase, which was *NIX based anyway

very interesting move strategically.<p>would I use it for my own project&#x27;s? no.<p>would I use it for some random software that requires mssql? yes.

Very happy to see this.<p>MS is extending the olive branch in so many ways, and we in the open source community can learn to forgive. Still, it will be hard to get over the mutual hostility from decades past.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;trudy-bourgeois&#x2F;what-george-wallace-taugh_b_6647468.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;trudy-bourgeois&#x2F;what-george-wa...</a>

Now if they port Microsoft Office, we&#x27;ll finally be able to say: &quot;hell hath frozen over&quot;.

Wow. Just two days ago we were wishing SQL was available in Linux so we could move away from Oracle.

I wonder if i can run EF on Windows with a SQL Server backend now?<p>What would be the memory usage difference?

One of the few usable products MS has (haven&#x27;t used it since SQL Server 2000 though).

This could reduce the cost of using SQL Server on AWS if Amazon supports this flavor.

Good move. It&#x27;s just late.

Here is the obligatory admiral ackbar link:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA</a><p>With that out of the way, I wonder if they will port their other software like Mcrosoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, various games, etcetera.

A few years ago, I would have though that somebody posted this three weeks early.

Oooh, I can&#x27;t wait to ignore Microsoft products on Linux as well!<p>PostgreSQL for me thanks.

Using SQL Server on Linux would be like swearing in church <i>silly smile</i>

How long until Microsoft put out their own BSD distribution?

I can&#x27;t wait to try this in the FreeBSD Linuxulator!

This is huge, competition for Oracle increases. :)

Checks calendar , hurmm it&#x27;s not April 1st ... ?<p>Wait I remember sun one asp server .<p>Please tell me this isn&#x27;t sql server written in c# using mono !

Gob-smacked.

This is absolutely amazing

hehe, No thank you

if you can&#x27;t fight them, join them!

Isn&#x27;t it too little and too late?

It would be more beneficial for whole community to contribute to Postgres.<p>We already have fairly superior commercial solution, like Informix Dynamic Server family, which is superior in everything, except compatibility with MS, that lost &quot;competition&quot; (to meme-based popularity) to crap like MySQL or bloatware like Oracle.<p>This is, again, good publicity and excellent PR action, but my bet is that performance and especially stability will be poor, like it is with .Net port or Skype port. To bring a server to the market requires expertise with target platform which very few UNIX shops has.<p>Open sourcing IDS, which has remarkable technology inside, which is partially related to Postgres, would be a much better move.)

Hey there! I&#x27;m trying to learn about this stuff , would anyone pls help me out how to be a hacker?

Looks like they announced this 3 weeks early.

I was not expecting that at all.

`Please join me Satya Nadella, Joseph Sirosh and Judson Althoff at our Data Driven .....<p>Thanks, Scott ` This is why there is a comma in grammar. `me Satya Nadella, X and Y` is different from `me, Satya Nadella, X and Y`

haha i thought I&#x27;m reading that microsoft will bring MSSQL to Linux. But I&#x27;m just dreaming

Hey guys, I&#x27;m trying to learn about this stuff, would anybody pls help me out!?

OMG - They&#x27;ll probably cripple the implementation of this. I wouldn&#x27;t trust MS on this. It sounds nice, but I wouldn&#x27;t set this up if it meant we could have world peace...<p>MS SQL relies heavily on Windows OS API. How are they going to pull this off? With some kind of VM layer running under linux with a stripped down Window OS which will run MS SQL?<p>MS Should announce that they are going to fork a version of Linux with their brand MS-Linux. Hell - If they port every piece of software over to Linux, they would rule the world &amp; back-end server market.<p>Any way. Good luck!