There's a great scene in Field of Dreams where James Earl Jones says that people will come. It's in response to the voices Kevin Costner hears early in the movie. This is the climax of the movie, where Costner makes a financial decision to trust his instincts and hope his farm will be saved.

In many cases, organizations do just this. They build something, assuming people will come. They may have some data, research, or other reasoning as to why why people will use what they build. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes they build something and hope people will come, much like Field of Dreams.

I wondered about this recently with some friends when discussing SQL Server on Linux. Quite a few people I know haven't seen any Linux installations inside their organizations. Others are consultants and haven't experienced any work on Linux, which is interesting. I've heard people at Microsoft state there are plenty of installations out there, but I've found few people who have moved from Windows.

I know a lot of people who work in the Microsoft data stack aren't familiar with Linux. This is despite all the articles and writings the last few years trying to teach people about Linux and how SQL Server runs well. I also see articles like this one, which claims Linux uses more CPU. This is despite Red Hat saying Linux runs SQL Server well and leads in benchmarks from TPC, at least the TPC-H results.

I learned at the various command lines in school, with a lot of time spent on Unix systems. Even with X-Windows, I often used the interface to open multiple shells to get work done. However, a lot of people have not worked at the command line very often. Despite the popularity of PowerShell, I find no shortage of Windows-based knowledge that struggles with certain concepts, like quoting and piping results between commands.

I don't know how many systems run Linux v Windows. Azure states that over 50% of their VMs aren't Windows, but Linux. I suspect a lot of those are likely web servers or other systems and not database platforms. They don't seem to publish how many databases are SQL Server on Linux, and I have no idea if Azure SQL Databases (or MI/Synapse/Fabric/etc.) run Windows or Linux. I suspect it could be either, but most likely Windows.

Do you feel comfortable running SQL Server on Linux? Is your organization considering it? I don't know I think it's worth the savings in license costs. Not that Windows is cheap, but the effort to train, learn, and work on a second OS might not provide any savings for years. Maybe not ever if you can't get work done smoothly and quickly.

They built it; now, will you come run it?