Linux admins, welcome to the future

It's a brave new world...

[root@localhost:~] # cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.4 (Maipo)
[root@localhost:~] # systemctl status mssql-server
● mssql-server.service - Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/mssql-server.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Fri 2018-01-19 14:06:12 AEDT; 18s ago
Docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux
Main PID: 2587 (sqlservr)
CGroup: /system.slice/mssql-server.service
├─2587 /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr
└─2613 /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr

Jan 19 14:06:17 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:17.45 spid19s SQL Server is now ready for client connections. This is an informational message; no us...s required.
Jan 19 14:06:17 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:17.45 spid6s 0 transactions rolled back in database 'msdb' (4:0). This is an informational message o...s required.
Jan 19 14:06:17 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:17.56 spid11s Polybase feature disabled.
Jan 19 14:06:17 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:17.56 spid11s Clearing tempdb database.
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.04 spid11s Starting up database 'tempdb'.
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.22 spid11s The tempdb database has 1 data file(s).
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.22 spid22s The Service Broker endpoint is in disabled or stopped state.
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.22 spid22s The Database Mirroring endpoint is in disabled or stopped state.
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.23 spid22s Service Broker manager has started.
Jan 19 14:06:18 localhost sqlservr[2587]: 2018-01-19 14:06:18.24 spid6s Recovery is complete. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

[root@localhost:~] # sqlcmd -S localhost -U SA
Password:
1> CREATE DATABASE testdb
2> select name from sys.databases
3> go
name
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
master
tempdb
model
msdb
testdb

(5 rows affected)
1>

 

I've been running MS SQL on linux for at least a year?

 

In prod, I assume?

How large is your instance(s)?

Are there any significant issues that you've encountered?

 

Eh, it's another database on Linux. We've been doing this for a while now. It's what we're good at.

Pretty happy to have Microsoft join the party finally. The more, the merrier.

 

mark this date in your calendar.

 

I've never been anti-Microsoft.

Windows is a piece of shit. MS Office is a piece of shit. Exchange is a piece of shit. But these three products don't define a company as enormous and as diverse as Microsoft.

 

Looks more like "Microsoft SQL Server, welcome to the future" to me.

 

Couldn't have said it better....

 

Microsoft have certainly moved in a different direction these last couple of years. Personally, I'm happy to run MSSQL if it means I can get rid of Oracle DBs. At least MS are making an attempt to play nice...

Anyway, the other question still stands - if anyone's got any production experience with MSSQL on Linux, I'd be very happy to hear it.

 

I think the important thing is to understand just 'why' MS are playing nice with Linux - And I can't help but get the feeling that it's got nothing to do with the fact that MS like Linux.

Linux is a difficult issue for Microsoft as the age old Extend, Embrace and Extinguish doesn't work with a decentralized product. Essentially, I get the feeling that what Microsoft are attempting do is incorporate all the reasons IT professionals use Linux into their own Windows OS in the hope of winning the infidels over - Therefore making Linux redundant.

My hope is that Linux users and IT professionals aren't that stupid.

Until I see MS release [gag] Microsoft Office for Linux with no restrictions, than I'm going to assume that Microsoft still view Linux as a cancer.

I'm also not specifically anti Microsoft, I'm more of an anti American capitalist bullshit kind of person.

 

the rather misnamed windows subsystem for linux being another example of that tactic

 

give this man a cookie and a copy of windows 10 - then blast ads at him so he uploads all his shit into microsofts hosted services.

 

Sweet another expensive DB to ignore and continue with PostgreSQL

 

Exactly.

 

I use Google's hosted services, Microsoft's hosted services suck.

 

While I agree with much of that, Microsoft today is different to Microsoft of years gone by, mostly because of their new leadership.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still cautious. But Nadella appears thus far to be someone who wants to work with the rest of the software industry, unlike his two predecessors who wanted to clobber it. It could all be a ruse, and I could be totally wrong. But for now, "cautiously optimistic" is my phrase of the day.

 

I'm cautiously cautious for the most part - their tactics with Win10 disturb me. The malware-style trick-installs, the public-as-beta-testers stuff, etc.

 

Usual MS tactic or is your memory had too many read/writes over the past 30years?

MS Strategy (History repeats)
1. Play nice with the market, be a good citizen, engage and gain market share.
2. After significant market share, start changing your product to not play as nice, usually MS charges or gives away its product to financially ruin its competitors but that won't work this time. (Make it harder to move away)
3. Once you have 3/4 of the market, dictate your agenda to captive market.

 

Considering American capitalism, I can't see any reason why Microsoft would want to play nice now. Having said that, Windows 10 adoption is stagnant as admitted by the CEO of MS himself only a few months ago and MS make more money out of their cloud based products now....

Who knows? But as I stated, they still have not released Microsoft Office for Linux as a stand alone alone application - Indicating that they don't really have any intention of 'supporting Linux'.

 

I certainly haven't forgotten, but point 3 is something that the GPL was written specifically to survive. And some 27 years later, Linux remains completely unaffected by all of Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" attempts.

One could even argue that "Linux" is doing better today than it ever has. AWS/S3 is much larger than Azure, and all Linux powered. Google uses Linux everywhere. Android is the dominant mobile OS on the planet. And even Microsoft *needed* to turn to Linux to make Azure "cloud scale".

SQL Server on Linux is no more threat to Linux than anything Microsoft have attempted in the past. Again, the GPL is a big part of that, but so is the pure merit of just how good Linux is, and how many companies contribute to it today (including Microsoft).

Microsoft's market share on the desktop hit nearly 90% at one point in the Windows era. Ironically enough, that was bad for their share price, as the company stalled. They saw no growth in other areas of their business, and they couldn't sell more copies of Windows as "everyone" already had one.

Like it or not, diversity in the market place is good for Microsoft. They need competition, they need growth from other players in the sector, and they need an industry that's bigger than just their ideas to thrive.

Again, I understand the concern overall. But never in all my years of using Linux (personally nor professionally) have I had any concern that Microsoft could ruin the market. And that reason is how clever the GPL is - it's written using the same underlying laws that all proprietary software uses, and so anyone who tries to undermine than ends up undermining their own profits.

People love to give Stallman a lot of crap for a lot of reasons. But the man understands the law very well, and has been very, very clever in ensuring open source software will prevail. We owe him a huge debt for that much, at least.