How Microsoft brought SQL Server to Linux

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/17/how-microsoft-brought-sql-server-to-linux/

by rusht • 9 years ago

190 159 9 years ago

esterly• 9 years ago

SQL Server source code originated on UNIX, ported to OS/2 then Windows. See the Sybase history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase

gaius3• 9 years ago

SQL Server 7.0 was a complete rewrite (you will notice that the Sybase copyright notices disappeared around then).

flukus6• 9 years ago

A rewrite, or a "rewrite"? I've seen plenty of press articles about something MS "rewrote" from the ground up, including windows itself, and they are never true.

Unless they actually started from a blank source repository then it was not a rewrite.

spikels• 9 years ago

Sybase had a version running on Linux back in 2003. Used it for a big analytics project. It blew away SQL Server in term of reliabilty. No need for regular restarts.

skc• 9 years ago

SQL Server requires regular restarts?

I find this hard to believe.

comeonnowreally• 9 years ago

If you need regular restarts of SQL Server then there's something really quite wrong with your setup.

polskibus2• 9 years ago

Does anyone know whether Analysis Services and Integration Services are also going to be available on Linux? What about Windows Authentication mechanism - is it going to be available, if yes then how would a Linux box join AD domain?

voltagex_• 9 years ago

No idea about the Services, but AD is covered in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

Neeek2• 9 years ago

I thought because Kerberos was OS agnostic you could already have Linux interacting with Windows AD?

polskibus2• 9 years ago

Microsoft has two extensions to Kerberos, impersonation and delegation. To use WA in a multi-tier set up (app, dB) you need those. I'm not sure if those extensions are available on Linux.

gaius3• 9 years ago

Whst is and is not included: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

noinsight2• 9 years ago

how would a Linux box join AD domain?

By using Red Hat's sssd which handles it pretty much seamlessly.

You get fully working Kerberos with that which should work with SQL server probably.

cjsuk3• 9 years ago

You get mostly working Kerberos. It's not quite that reliable.

rdiddly• 9 years ago

Unexplained photo of Portland's Steel Bridge. Is it a reference to OSCON?

cpeterso• 9 years ago

The article says Microsoft ported SQL Server to Linux using a 2011 Microsoft Research project called "Drawbridge":

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/

eapotapov• 9 years ago

This seems to me as some kind of defeat and that makes me sad. It's sad for me to look how great companies grew old

I think Microsoft is now afraid that people (developers that were hired by enterprises) are willing to move to *nix so much so that they will force enterprises to gave up on MS stack.

This way they could lose SQL Server customer and Windows customer at the same time - having SQL Server version for Linux will keep SQL Server customer.

I believe this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago, and moreover, it would have sounded just unbelievable.

This reminds me not only of things that could change very fast. It reminds that even when things go well with your business there's always someone thing that could "disrupt" your market, like a new dimension. And that thing won't be invisible. It will grow nearby and you will see such company and just won't assume that it represents any danger.

nimchimpsky• 9 years ago

You've made some big leaps if you think this is sad.

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

It is not sad, it is Microsoft playing the right moves to stay relevant, instead of joining Sun, DEC, Wang and many others that were once upon something great.

Look at SGI and Cray, they also had to re-invent themselves around their own distributions of GNU/Linux and tailored made hardware, instead of keep selling their own UNIX variants.

If I have to develop on UNIX-like OSes, but can still enjoy all the nice Microsoft tooling I have grew to love, then great.

Love or hate it, FOSS around UNIX has commoditized the OSes.

Who knows if now we will ever move away from a UNIX monoculture on the enterprise, specially with the increasing Linux / OS X love from Microsoft side.

igravious• 9 years ago

This seems to me as some kind of defeat and that makes me sad. It's sad for me to look how great companies grew old

Your sadness is misplaced.

Presumably you like resilience, yes? How does one achieve resiliency? At least in part via redundancy. A homogeneous environment, which an environment which relies on one vendor is, is non-redundant. All you've got then is a single point of lock-in, that can never be a good idea. You can be held hostage to the whims of the vendor. As soon as Linux became a viable choice to Windows and old Unix people left in their droves, and for this very reason.

To my mind, Microsoft is now acting like a more mature rational hungry company. I thought I'd never see the day. And frankly, if they hadn't started changing they'd be on the road to complete irrelevance.

This way they could lose SQL Server customer and Windows customer at the same time

False. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845783 Staying with SQL Server because Linux version was provided.

I believe this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago, and moreover, it would have sounded just unbelievable.

Agreed. But that was not a good thing, that was very bad. For Microsoft, and their customers. Now that may have been something to lament.

manigandham2• 9 years ago

The world is (always) changing. Success comes from constant evolution.

For Microsoft, this is continued victory, not defeat.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

Years ago I was part of a project that became a startup. We got a Bizspark license and originally developed for MS SQL. Later we added in support for Postgres/MySQL. Running unit tests against Postgres/MySQL was pretty easy on my Linux box, but for MS SQL I'd have to start a VM and provision SQL Server 2012 (at the time).

I jumped on the Linux version as soon as I heard about it. I never got an invite to the preview, but once the Docker container was released, I fully integrated it into our tests:

https://github.com/BigSense/BigSenseTester/blob/master/docke...

I can now pull up all three DBs in containers (mysql/pgsql/mssql) and three instances of BigSense and run tests over all three in a deterministic manner.

I had started working on automating a Windows Server with automatic SQL installation in Vagrant, but that was starting to look really complicated. If it wasn't for MS porting their database to Linux, we probably would have dropped it from the project.

foodie_2• 9 years ago

Curious why have postgres and SQL server?

unixhero• 9 years ago

Mssql has a lot of cool and valuable entry level features bundled with it, as an added bonus to the transactional relational database.

Like the business intelligence features

Datawarehouse functionality Machine learning capabilities within the warehouse suite

Mdx (which enables things like power pivot / power query)

Myself I am a Postgres guys, but man those extras are really enticing to me as a problem solver.

hungerstrike2• 9 years ago

He said that they "originally developed for MS SQL." and then "Later we added in support for Postgres/MySQL."

Sounds like they develop a product that can use multiple RDBMS back-ends. Also, I'm guessing that since 90% of the businesses out there use Microsoft products, you would probably want to support their products in such a venture.

On a personal note, I find anything that's not SQL Server to be tedious to work with due to the lack of high quality GUIs, client tools and certain features.

For instance - did you know that Postgres can't easily return multiple resultsets? In SQL Server I just write one procedure containing multiple SELECT statements and my client code can get all of those resultsets with only one call to that procedure. This one feature alone cuts down on all sorts of boilerplate code and trips to the database.

wilhil• 9 years ago

As someone who has tried some early builds, what annoys me is that they have made it a lot easier and much quicker to install on Linux than it is on Windows!

deadbunny2• 9 years ago

Isn't everything?

tkubacki• 9 years ago

It's hard to make things easy on Windows - it's law of nature.

alkonaut9• 9 years ago

It's actually not - if you try to avoid integrating in any way with the os. Shared-nothing apps are pretty nice.

SQL server and a few of the other behemoth apps seem to have a very hard time staying separate from windows which is annoying.

In Linux the design benefit is that there are package managers and the flaw is that there are many. Shipping a simple binary installer for multiple distributions is still tricky.

smartbit• 9 years ago

I would never recommend SQL Server on Linux for Enterprise production.

- licensing costs are probably the same. If the cost of an additional Windows Server license is an argument, something else is going on.

- recently having dealt with MS Enterprise support on Linux, it was an horrendous experience I can nobody recommend

- an Enterprise with need for SQL Server without Windows Server support engineers?

- did we see independent performance tests published? A quick search I found these http://www.fhtino.it/blog/showpost.aspx?id=6790c78accb84f9c9..., seemingly not a convincing argument.

IMHO the whole story stinks and none of the arguments mentioned by Microsoft are valid. Probably it is all about winning hearts and minds.

SQL Server on Docker images for Devs is great as these are free of licensing costs (I guess).

taspeotis• 9 years ago

I think it's partly a hat-tip to ISVs using .NET. Entity Framework (Core and Desktop) works best with SQL Server, with whole .NET Core is cross-platform thing they let ISVs sell to Linux shops too. The alternative would be to mix EF with PostgreSQL or (horror of horrors) MySQL which is a pain-in-the-ass for testing/QA. ORMs are leaky abstractions!

If you're ponying up for a SQL Server license you can afford to pony up for the Windows license. But if you're not a Microsoft shop and you're buying .NET Core-based COTS you can skip the license fees and install SQL Server vNext Express on your Linux machines. (Up to the point where you max out Express and have to cough up for Standard anyway.)

jmkni2• 9 years ago

At our place, we use ServiceStack with OrmLite, which runs well on .net core and plays nicely with MySQL.

You can switch between SQL Server and MySQL by changing just one line of code.

hacksonx• 9 years ago

My home desktop (Intel Pentium G645) doesn't support virtualization and I guess this means I can't run this.

dom0• 9 years ago

That CPU of course supports virtualization.

bjg• 9 years ago

There is no virtualization used in SQL server on Linux... It's not a VM. It's a just like any other Linux process... It just happens to have something that looks a lot like the NT Kernel running inside that process.

chx• 9 years ago

Microsoft is playing a fantastic Linux game with putting Linux userspace on the Windows desktop where drivers and UI are far better than the Linux drivers and UI and putting SQL Server on Linux server where the Linux kernel is much stronger. They know their strengths and weaknesses and not afraid to play to them.

Here's my writeup on setting up Windows 10 as a long, long time Linux user https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...

thriftwy11• 9 years ago

Too bad that Windows 10 barely usable on itself.

Every application looks different (yes they used to blame Linux/X11 on that one). It has two control panels (or three maybe), two web browsers shipped with it.

Takes more than a minute to boot on a new and pretty formidable laptop. This is the fresh factory install.

Can freeze the desktop while apparently doing something under the hood (installing updates? scanning malware? summoning the devil?), without any indication as to why, and not come back in five minutes.

Seriously considering overwriting it with Ubuntu even when it's aimed for a non-technical user.

tiernano2• 9 years ago

just curious: you say "new, factory fresh install"... is this factory fresh, as in "OEM" install, or your own install? if its OEM, could it be whatever crap was installed? third party antivirus, etc? i have Win10 installed on a Surface Book, and, other them me installing stuff i shouldent, the machine works well... i did have to uninstall corporate AV (the standard MS one works just as well... and its cheaper than the corporate one...) but other than that, as long as i dont install "stupid" stuff (other AV, any other crap that fecks with the system) all is good...

sz4kerto2• 9 years ago

Too bad that Windows 10 barely usable on itself.

I am always surprised to hear these statements. Hundreds of millions of people use W10, so it must be usable to some extent. I think it's also quite rare that the system stops for 5 minutes -- actually I've never seen that happening.

aykutcan3• 9 years ago

Windows 10 is usable in every aspect.

Boot speed is pretty good and doesnt freeze like that.

Check your hardware if that is a fresh factory install. You are doing something wrong.

They are not common problems. They are yours.

eddieroger• 9 years ago

Barely usable is dramatic, but the multiple interfaces to do seemingly the same thing is annoying and I agree makes usability a challenge. What differentiates when a setting is in the old Control Panel versus the new one? What's the difference between Edge and Internet Explorer, and why is my browser sometimes a traditional window and sometimes a full screen, touch focused app (this is a gaming PC hooked to a TV, so no touching)? I'm often accused of being an Apple fanboy, and while I try to stay agnostic, I think some of the things Windows has done with 10 are pretty confusing, though markedly better than whatever they tried to do with 8.

43224gg2522• 9 years ago

Agreed. No "hacker" would ever use or recommend Windows. It's awful for development, and even microsoft agrees, which is why they created a Linux sub-system.

Why would a so called "hacker" choose to use an OS that's slow, has horrible update policies, horrible privacy standards, injects ads into the main programs and start menu, requires anti-virus, etc?

Also, the idea that Windows has good drivers and Linux doesn't is asinine. My current dell came pre-loaded with windows 10 and failed to wake from sleep without me opening and closing the lid, then when it woke up, wifi would not come on and the only thing that fixed it was a reboot. Then when I used the touch screen things were going fine until I tried to select text and got an instant BSOD. Also I learned not to accidentally touch the screen and then try to type immediately afterward, or it would lock up the whole OS.

Linux just worked. Literally. Even the touch screen. I get 15 minutes less battery life but it's worth it.

bb611• 9 years ago

My boot time on an SSD + i5 on my 4.5 year old desktop is <10 seconds. The same PC boots Ubuntu in ~5. ~2 seconds of both is BIOS boot time. I haven't experienced any annoying issues with Win 10.

Obviously, there is some variation in experience, and I doubt all of it can be chalked up to the OS.

JCharante• 9 years ago

Takes more than a minute to boot on a new and pretty formidable laptop. This is the fresh factory install.

Oh come on, you can't blame the OS for that. Whenever I want to play games my Desktop is loading the desktop in less than 20 seconds, it's not optimal but if it takes 1 minute there has to be something wrong with the laptop.

tw045• 9 years ago

Every application looks different (yes they used to blame Linux/X11 on that one). It has two control panels (or three maybe), two web browsers shipped with it.

So you want your cake and you want to eat it too? It's pretty well known that as part of the new iterative release cycle they're slowly moving things into the new "control panel". That's not going to happen overnight, and unless you want to go back to only seeing new releases every 4+ years, we're going to have to be patient.

Takes more than a minute to boot on a new and pretty formidable laptop. This is the fresh factory install.

Then something is seriously broken with the laptop, or you're running off a spinning drive. Regardless, if boot time is your primary factor in choosing an OS, you're doing it wrong.

Can freeze the desktop while apparently doing something under the hood (installing updates? scanning malware? summoning the devil?), without any indication as to why, and not come back in five minutes.

Between that and your boot times, I would imagine you've got a garbage hard drive. I've never had windows "Freeze the desktop for 5 minutes at a time". A quick google search also finds no relevant posts on other people experiencing the same behavior. Windows updates wouldn't freeze your desktop. Heck, video card driver updates will cause your screen to black out for a couple seconds, but not freeze for 5 minutes.

ekianjo2• 9 years ago

Thats if you dont mind the hugely privacy invasive win10 environment to begin with.

yulaow• 9 years ago

At least their new privacy settings are far more decent and complete than before... still hope they put it as opt-in instead of opt-out.

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

It is way less than what Google does on my Android devices.

Now Google Maps even asks me to upload pictures of places where I happen to be.

geofft3• 9 years ago

Good point. Let me switch to Ubuntu, which definitely doesn't have any privacy invasions in its desktop environment....

Beltiras• 9 years ago

"Kumar also noted that many enterprises were looking for an alternative to Oracle’s database products."

Does this translate to enterprises wanting a stick to beat Oracle with when negotiating license fees?

stepik777• 9 years ago

Interesting, looks like they are using something similar to Wine to run it on Linux.

CrossWired• 9 years ago

SQL Server has had its underlying SQLOS since the SQL 2005 rewrite, so the mechanics to port to Linux has been in place for years:

https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2015/11/11/sql-server-what-is-...

CrLf2• 9 years ago

I'm still unsure of the usefulness of SQL Server on Linux. I don't see the point of running SQL Server on Linux (I'd rather choose PostgreSQL or something), nor do I see the point of choosing Linux if I'd already settled for SQL Server.

I don't think this (in the end) is anything more than a marketing trick, there to give the illusion of choice.

This is not uncommon in ISVs, btw. There are many commercial offerings that have a Linux version, crippled in so many interesting ways that it makes it pointless. I'm a Linux person but I advocated against choosing Linux versions (of different products) many times in the past. Actually, that means the marketing trick works.

In my experience, software always has a primary plaform where it shines, and the other "supported" platforms are always stepchildren.

qarioz• 9 years ago

I don't see any plus either, but I can see management telling developers to use sql servers or to maintain old database using Linux.

d4nt• 9 years ago

I think for .net developers, this makes more sense. You have an existing .net app, built to talk to MS SQL Server, if the latest version of .net can run on Linux, but your DB can't then you're faced with either managing two OS flavours, or just ignoring the Linux compatibility.

Ignoring Linux compatibility would have knock on effects because Linux is now the platform for so many other tool, e.g. Docker.

Regardless of how easy the 'upgrade and migrate to Linux' story is right now, I think it's vital that MS started down this road. Otherwise the .net framework would be [seen as] finished now, and people would start planning to migrate off it.

marsrover• 9 years ago

This is the situation I'm in with a toy app I built. It is running .NET Core, talking to SQLServer, and running on Windows Server 2016. I want to migrate the entire application to my Debian box and without SQLServer on Linux, this would be much more painful.

grovegames• 9 years ago

I have 20 years of experience with SQL Server, and zero experience with PostgreSQL. You aren't the target market, but I certainly am.

dspillett3• 9 years ago

I think a large part of it is supporting cross-platform developers who might be mainly Linux based internally, so someone writing apps in node primarily on Linux (for example) can more easily test against MS SQL Server (as well as postgres/mariadb/...) and add it to the "supported" list without that being quite as much hassle as it might otherwise be. SQL Server working on Linux potentially increases its catchment area for devs and projects noticeably. I see that as a much more likely use case than SQL Server on Linux in production.

Now that practically all the features are available in the standard edition (depending on your support and scale-up/scale-out requirements) it could end up used in production for licensing cost reasons particularly if the availability/DR/scaling features work well (where previously if you needed Enterprise edition the cost of windows was a drop in the ocean - Standard isn't exactly pocket money cheap but still...).

Another PoV could just be that these days interpolarity matters much more to MS than it used to, as their key product focus is moving further away from the OS & individual services and more onto the platform with Azure - they don't care what DB engine you run on which OS, as long as you do so on their platform - hence moves to support postgres & mysql in the database-as-a-service-upon-platform-as-a-service manner that they already offer for SQL Server. Of course they'd prefer that you used Windows and SQL Server but not wanting to (or depending on the project, not being able to) use one needn't get in the way of using the other, not should not using one (or either) get I the way of using Azure.

tw045• 9 years ago

That's because you're missing the point. MS isn't competing against Postgres or MySQL, they're competing against Oracle, DB2, and Hana. All of which have a variant that runs on Linux. They need to be just as flexible as their real competition if they want to continue to expand market share.

gmarx• 9 years ago

meta-point. You could have edited out your first sentence

gwbas1c• 9 years ago

I work for a SAAS company that uses MS SQL. I've heard over an over that ops and management loves MS SQL but hates Windows.

MS SQL is the product that people are choosing, not Windows. Why should the MS SQL team force people to choose Windows?

snuxoll2• 9 years ago

As much as I love PostgreSQL, which is a lot, MS SQL still has some exceptional functionality around business intelligence and handles large reporting warehouses with ease. We just purchased three UCS blades for a new SQL Server deployment to consolidate our existing databases and handle the data warehousing project we are starting, here I am wasting days writing ansible modules and roles to set everything up when I could just be templating out a couple config files if all the SQL Server components ran on Linux.

I'm incredibly happy Microsoft is bringing SQL Server to Linux as a DevOps person, I'm really hoping SSIS/SSAS/SSRS makes it in eventually because they're the only thing keeping me from saying we should be deploying the new cluster on Linux instead of Windows.

mmargerum3• 9 years ago

I don't want or need windows server and certainly don't want to pay for cals for my users. However, I'm very happy with sql server and will pay for that running on Linux . My middleware is go and I can cross compile it to Linux from my mac. I would have no code to rewrite to make it happen

CrLf2• 9 years ago

Honest question: won't SQL Server on Linux require CALs as well?

manigandham2• 9 years ago

Like the article suggested, we use SQL Server and it's running on the only Windows host in our entire stack. This is a great move and we're looking forward to being completely on Linux.

Postgres is a great database but SQL Server has some fantastic features like columnstores, in-memory oltp, graph queries.

Linux has better tooling than Windows and SQL Server has better tooling than all other relational databases, it's a great match.

How Microsoft brought SQL Server to Linux

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