Vlad Drumea tries out SQL Server 2025:
This post covers creating SQL Server 2025 containers in Podman, Qnap Container Station, and sqlcmd, and restoring a sample database to test the new version.
One important thing to remember is that all SQL Server 2025 containers are based on the Linux build of SQL Server. For 90% of tasks (give or take), that won’t matter, and you’ll still have a good time trying out the new version of SQL Server and make sure things still work in your databases the way you expect them to. But some functionality (e.g., merge replication) is not available in Linux and other functionality (like PolyBase or Machine Learning Services) has a very different installation process.