Do We Need to Learn Linux?

This week we got an announcement about SQL Server in Containers. Microsoft put out a blog noting that the beta program for SQL Server on Windows containers is suspended. They didn't give any details, citing "ecosystem challenges and usage patterns" as a reason so suspend the program for the foreseeable future.

Not only that, they noted that they were deleting docker hub images for express and developer, which makes sense from their perspective. They don't want to support these. From the developer perspective, however, this will break and flow, pipelines, or even local scripts from developers. I understand the desire to delete images, but doing so without any notice doesn't seem like fair treatment for people using them.

This means that if you want to run SQL Server in a container, you have to use Linux. I think that containers will be the future of database development, as they standardize and simplify how we can get an environment up and running. They also ensure consistent environments between developers, branches, automated systems and more. I think it's going to take years, but that's the direction where I think many of us will go over time. Those days of the Developer Edition will be gone, and instead we'll just run a container.

I've been using Linux containers for a few years, and they make it easy to quickly set up a clean environment with a new instance and a database or two. In that time, I've had to use a little Linux at times, but really, I start a container from a command line and then it acts like an instance I've installed. There isn't a reason to actually do much in Linux. At least not for the core database stuff. Most of the ways that you'll work with a Linux instance as a developer stay the same.

For system administrators and DBAs, however, you might need to learn more. While setting up an instance on Linux isn't hard, and easier in a container, if you are called on to work in bash, execute sudo, or some other Linux command, you might want some basic familiarity. Fortunately, you don't need another workstation as Windows 10 includes a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that let's you play around in Linux inside Windows 10.

I think Linux is fascinating, and it's evolved in many ways since I first saw it in 1991. Even if it's not something you expect to use daily, spending a few hours learning how to navigate around and get things done is good for your mind, forcing you to learn a bit. The San Diego TIG did a series a few years ago, and you might go through those meetings or pick up a book and spend some time playing around with something new. You never know when this might be required in your career and a little familiarity could give you a jump start in the future.

Do we need to learn Linux? No, but it's not a bad idea to build a few skills in this area.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

In practical Machine Learning workloads, various infrastructures and devices (such as, a variety of GPUs, high-speed inter-connections, etc) are required and used. With Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning, you can bring AML open architecture into existing external resources, such as, on-premise GPU machines or 3rd party platforms (EKS, GKE, etc).

Do you have quite large MDF files on your database...

What if you’re moving a database to a new server...

Running DBCC CHECKDB or DBCC CHECKTABLE on a database may report error 8961. Such a situation could occur while changing the data type of a table column from “ntext... The...

DBAs can control many aspects of SQL Server’s behavior with trace flags. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains how to enable SQL Server trace flags.… The post How to enable...

The SQL Server transaction log must be managed to keep a database running and performing well. In this article, Greg Larsen explains how to manage the transaction log size.

Welcome back to the series “Server Review Essentials for Accidental and Junior DBAs.” So far in this series we’ve taken a look at how to set up your work...

Who am I kidding? You’re not really going to get ready, but let’s talk about this anyway. SQL Server 2016 mainstream support ends Tuesday, July 13, 2021. According to...

I was recently asked what permissions were needed to force plans in query store. I’m sure I knew at one point, but at the moment I was asked, I...

Anytime you run a query, SQL Server needs to build an execution plan to use as directions for best executing that query. These execution plans can be stored in...

In 2018 I wrote two blog posts about memory accounting behavior on NUMA servers I was seeing in SQL Server 2016, 2017, and eventually 2019. Some amount of memory counted...

In this blog post I am looking at how to load or r...

This article is a part of the series Learn NoSQL in Azure where we will learn about the DocumentDB SQL API in detail. Azure Cosmos DB is a serverless...

There were a couple of new features and enhancements to existing features in the June 2021 Power BI Desktop release that don’t seem to have much to do with...

Reading Time: 4 minutes In this post I want to cover creating one Power BI report for both Azure Boards and GitHub. Because I covered it in a...

It was always important to me to keep up with the ...

Azure SQL Database and SQL Managed instance are Microsoft offerings for PaaS SQL Server in cloud infrastructure. In the case of a traditional on-premises SQL Server, at certain times,...

Is your company hiring for a database position? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here. If your...

I wanted to talk about this because I see a lot of doubts and lack of direction from people who are either beginning now in IT land or thinking about switching careers. The short answer to “do I need to know SQL for a data job?” , is yes. In the next few paragraphs I explain why I think so.

I was speaking with one of my favorite people in the SQL Server community, Grant Fritchey (blog|twitter), on twitter today. ... Continue reading The post The SQL Server community and...

Month Of Sundays All this month I’m going to be giving readers (watchers? stalkers?) access to my Starting SQL video course. It’s part of my paid training content, which...

Today I want to write about the community that brought us all together. The community that got this very website on your radar. The community that got many of...

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, cloud-native data warehouse. Tens of thousands of customers have successfully migrated their workloads to Amazon Redshift. We hear from customers that they need case-insensitive collation for strings in Amazon Redshift in order to maintain the same functionality and meet their performance goals when they migrate their existing workloads from legacy, on-premises data warehouses like Teradata, Oracle, or IBM. With that goal in mind, AWS provides an option to create case-insensitive and case-sensitive collation.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Template is a cloud automation API for deploying Azure resources such as VM, database, network and storage services repeatedly with little(more...) The post Azure Resource Manager...

Join Vistaprint Senior DBA, Adam Brenden and Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Grant Fritchey to hear first-hand how proactive estate monitoring and accurate reporting, now enable the Vistaprint team to detect, diagnose, and resolve performance problems before they impact operations or customers.

I am honored to join viewers for a SQLBits Replay ...

How do you list all the objects and values within a PowerShell object, investigate an object or explore its structure? There must be a simple way. I used to...

Today’s post outlines one approach to get your message across more clearly: use color to connect the slide title to the graph.  First, a bit of background. When communicating with...

Joe Celko explains how missing data is handled from the printing press to databases.

(2021-July-07) Back in the late 90s when I was a college student intern at a local power supply company, I was invited to a social event of our IT department.... The...

This article will help you get started with Power Query in Azure Data Factory to perform Data Wrangling. Introduction Modern data landscape and infrastructure consist of a variety of...

As I opened my inbox this morning, I was surprised. I keep track of when Intel puts products on End of Life (or starts the process through something called...

FILTERS: Returns a table of the filter values applied directly to the specified column. https://dax.guide/filters/

If you aren’t using Tabular Editor to format all of your DAX code for you, you are missing out. I’ve written a super short script that will format all of your DAX code in measures, and make it look picture perfect in Power BI Desktop.

The UNICHAR() DAX function is a text function that takes a numerical Unicode value and displays its associated character. For example, UNICHAR(128515) will display as:

Learn how blank values in a DAX conditional expression can affect its query plan and how to apply possible optimizations to improve performance in these cases.

GROUPBY: Creates a summary the input table grouped by the specified columns. https://dax.guide/groupby/ CURRENTGROUP: Access to the (sub)table representing current group in GroupBy function. Can be used only inside...

Starting SQL: SARGability If you want to check out...

A command I like to use when performance tuning is DBCC INPUTBUFFER. If you have ever run sp_whoisactive or sp_who2 to find out what sessions are executing when CPU...

Monitoring SQL Server for performance is a critical part of a DBA’s job. In this article, Edward Pollack explains some of the SQL Server performance monitor data and how to collect it.

Welcome to part nineteen of the plansplaining series, where I will finally wrap up the discussion on temporal tables. In the first three parts, we looked at execution plans...

There are different ways you can create buckets or...

The QDS Toolbox is set of tools that can help you review and store the performance related data in Query Store. This was released by ChannelAdvisor last September thanks to the hard work of a number of my coworkers.

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than...

In the last few posts, I’ve written about using the SQL Compare command line for a specific object and shown how to get a report. This post will look... The...

In this blog post, you will learn how to implement...

was recently asked to convert all the fonts in my ggplot2-generated figures for a paper to Times New Roman. It turns out that this is easy, but it brought up a whole host of questions that I don’t have the full answer to.

Another useless function that could be found in ma...

SQL Server Transactional Replication is one of the most common Replication techniques used to copy or distribute data across multiple destinations. In the previous articles, we discussed SQL Server...

Financial services firm says data was stolen by ex...

ArsTechnica has a good story on the REvil ransomware attack of last weekend, with technical details: This weekend’s attack was carried out with almost surgical precision. According to Cybereason, the...

A closer look at the Windows printer software vulnerability – and what you can do about it.

Everyone hates the old ways of authentication. But change comes with its own drawbacks.

A vulnerability (just patched) in the random number generator used in the Kaspersky Password Manager resulted in easily guessable passwords: The password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several...

Michael J Swart takes a look at a few common UI design patterns that don't necessarily scale well with SQL Server. The post UI Design Patterns That Don't Scale appeared...

This is part 14 of a 19 part series on TSQL Basics. You will first gain an understanding of the differences between each of these types of joins, and...

Since I started at Stack Overflow, I’ve had the ...

In this article, we will explore the xp_fileexist extended stored procedure usage and other details. At the same time, we will take a look at alternative methods to this...

Today’s one of my favorite days – the day we s...

Amazon's legal stall tactics seem to have paid off.

Executive order comes amid growing state, federal push to open repair process.

That’s right! I’m starting a new blog site tod...

The world's fourth-largest OEM just laid out its electrification strategy.

Ars meets the college engineers who hope to revolutionize racing.

The French Lion last tasted victory at La Sarthe in 2009.

In the last post we built an image of SQL server 2019 Linux hosted in Azure Container Instance for fast access to SQL server. So, your next question is... The...

As you may be aware, the SQL Server on Windows Containers Beta program began in 2017. It has remained in Beta mode meant for only test and development environment...