I’ve been working with containers and writing a bit about them for awhile. I find them to be fascinating and useful as a technology, and I’ve come to really believe these will change how we work with the SQL Server data platform.
In any case, I wanted to get the latest SQL Server 2019 version recently, so I decided to download the container image. I’ve had a few on my machine, and so upgrading to the latest was a question of running this:
docker image pull mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-CTP3.1-ubuntu
The main SQL Server 2019 image exists in a few flavors on my machine, so as you can see, I don’t even download the entire image.
There were only 4 layers I needed to pull since I already had the other 5 layers. This took about 10 minutes on my nice, but not great, 15MBps download speed. That’s much quicker than I could download an iso to install, plus I’d need to uninstall the previous CTP.
With containers, I can just run any CTP by picking the image from my list.
If you haven’t tried working with containers, I’d urge you to start learning a bit. This is amazing technology that your developers already use, or want to use, and I expect data professionals to follow suit in the next few years.