Announcing SQL Server on Linux
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And I wonder how often people are not deploying, and therefore not getting locked in, to SQL Server due to the Windows requirement currently? By forcing it to be on Windows, Microsoft facing the potential veto power of a different corporate division. If they get onto Linux, the systems admin teams will have far less power to stand in the way of deployments.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And I wonder how often people are not deploying, and therefore not getting locked in, to SQL Server due to the Windows requirement currently? By forcing it to be on Windows, Microsoft facing the potential veto power of a different corporate division. If they get onto Linux, the systems admin teams will have far less power to stand in the way of deployments.
True. And, it is a solid product. Even as a Unix guy, former Solaris fanatic and Sun fanboy during the 90s, and all that it is weird to say. I was impressed with Windows Server 2000 when it came out and I was also impressed with SQL Server 2005, though 2012 I thought was the best improvement I've seen.
Scalabilitywise it's not much different from MySQL, except that it's more expensive, but it's more easier to setup clustering and fail overs, etc. Interestingly I'm curious if that will also be in the Linux version, or they won't just strip all that out.
So those old arguments won't really work either, but then again I still see a few PostgreSQL fanatics using anti-MySQL talking points from 2000, like "no row level locking."
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@tonyshowoff said:
True. And, it is a solid product. Even as a Unix guy, former Solaris fanatic and Sun fanboy during the 90s, and all that it is weird to say. I was impressed with Windows Server 2000 when it came out and I was also impressed with SQL Server 2005, though 2012 I thought was the best improvement I've seen.
Same here, 1990s Sun fanboy. SQL Server is an excellent database server, being mired to the Windows OS has long been a huge stumbling block for it. With SQL Server available on UNIX systems, it probably displaces every conceivable installation of Oracle that I can think of (it won't do so in practice, but it may do so in spirit.) SQL Server has long been one of the best commercial RDBMS products on the market, but it was unnecessarily out of reach to UNIX shops that might be interested in deploying it, unnecessarily expensive to support, not aligned with broader database products, curtailed by the limitations of its host environment and simply not treated with the level of enterprise thinking that other database products received.
I'm not going to run out and start deploying SQL Server willy nilly instead of MariaDB and PostgreSQL. But having SQL Server Express available on Linux is going to change a lot of SMB's thinking. And it is going to give migration paths and upgrade paths to a lot of current SQL Server shops that have been considering dropping them rather than moving forward with them.
One of the most important things, that I mentioned in the earlier thread on the same topic, is that this will, very likely, mean that SQL Server can return to RISC systems. What people in the SMB often don't realize is that until just recently (2008 R2 era) SQL Server was the key driver for Windows Server on HP Integrity big iron Itanium EPIC systems. HP dropped those systems, Intel has dropped the processor and Microsoft dropped support for the architecture in 2010. This has left their big SQL Server product with no big iron deployment option completely cutting its legs out from under it. If you need to scale up, SQL Server doesn't do it any longer (I knew people running SQL Server on HP SuperDome, this is a real deployment scenario.)
With this move to Linux, my guess is that AMD64 is a small piece of the puzzle and that far larger is the release on Power and maybe Sparc systems. MS SQL Server running on massive IBM i and z series hardware could bring SQL Server back to where it was just a few years ago. Without this, SQL Server is stuck in the SMB market solely or for smaller workloads at higher cost than its competitors.
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@scottalanmiller I actually remember saying to someone in 2001 (right before 9/11 is why I remember) that Microsoft should put SQL Server on Linux, because AOL had been migrating from Sybase and goofy proprietary databases to Oracle on Red Hat. We had a vast improvement with that alone, but I can't imagine how much AOL spent on licensing.
I have no plans to really start using it either, but I like the idea that you could get clients off Windows if necessary, or in consulting work it also makes things a little bit more interesting. I've got 250 MySQL servers for one web site alone; I'd rather not even bother switching.
I'd like to see Microsoft do, as you said on the other thread, get into the Linux desktop arena, it'd be nice to see more fully integrated Linux machines into Windows domains. Since Windows 2000 I've thought out of all the centralised methods for security, Windows Domains is the best and least irritating -- it has its problems and weird issues, but it's solid as heck, and puts that goofy Netware stuff to shame... still gives me nightmares.
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@tonyshowoff said:
@scottalanmiller I actually remember saying to someone in 2001 (right before 9/11 is why I remember) that Microsoft should put SQL Server on Linux, because AOL had been migrating from Sybase and goofy proprietary databases to Oracle on Red Hat. We had a vast improvement with that alone, but I can't imagine how much AOL spent on licensing.
Sybase on UNIX is way better than Oracle on UNIX, no wonder AOL failed so hard.
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@tonyshowoff said:
I'd like to see Microsoft do, as you said on the other thread, get into the Linux desktop arena, it'd be nice to see more fully integrated Linux machines into Windows domains.
They've already made Linux Mint a full peer with Windows 10 on Azure AD, which is amazing. We haven't started rolling out that integration yet, but we hope to.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
@scottalanmiller I actually remember saying to someone in 2001 (right before 9/11 is why I remember) that Microsoft should put SQL Server on Linux, because AOL had been migrating from Sybase and goofy proprietary databases to Oracle on Red Hat. We had a vast improvement with that alone, but I can't imagine how much AOL spent on licensing.
Sybase on UNIX is way better than Oracle on UNIX, no wonder AOL failed so hard.
Oh Scott, you think that's the only reason?
When I think back at some of the security and databases and just how it scaled...The horror... the horror.
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What if it was free? Will it have a free express version? The
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@aaronstuder said:
What if it was free? Will it have a free express version? The
I think that everyone is assuming that Express will be available the same as on Windows.
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@scottalanmiller Do you know what they say about assuming?
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@aaronstuder said:
@scottalanmiller Do you know what they say about assuming?
It makes an ass out of you.
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@tonyshowoff said:
@aaronstuder said:
@scottalanmiller Do you know what they say about assuming?
It makes an ass out of you.
It's also the mother of all foulups.
