I had an interesting question on twitter last week when I published my post on Running Linux Container on Windows: –

“Does that container support Microsoft ML yet?”

I have absolutely no experience with Machine Learning so really had no clue. But as I had the container up and running I thought I’d give it a quick test by seeing if I could run a Python script. However I didn’t get far: –

The required services are not installed in the container so no luck. It’s the same with the SQL Agent service, you can enable it and create jobs but when you try and run them: –

The SQL Agent service is there in windows containers but if you try and start it up you’ll get a whole bunch of errors.

So it seems, for now, that it really is just the Database Engine that’s available in containers. That’s really useful on its own but there are a lot of people out there who require the other components of SQL Server. If Microsoft want to see people running SQL in Containers become widespread, then more functionality really needs to be available.

I actually have high hopes for this, especially with the announcement of the Agent running on Linux. Hopefully we’ll see this in containers soon.

Hmm, could try to build a custom image with the Agent…

Have a good week!