A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andrew Pruski notices a change:
Hmm, ok we have a script /opt/mssql/bin/launch_sqlservr.sh and then the sqlservr binary is called.
I swear this wasn’t always the case, have I seen that before? Started to doubt myself so spun up a pod running an older version of SQL (2019 CU5) and took a look: –
It looks like this was a somewhat recent change, but with it comes an interesting new capability that Andrew shows off.
Leave a CommentUmair Shahid digs into the arguments for and against:
“Should PostgreSQL run on Kubernetes too?”
The worst answers are the confident ones:
- “Yes, because everything else is on Kubernetes.”
- “No, because databases are special.”
Both are lazy. The right answer depends on what you’re optimizing for: delivery velocity, platform consistency, latency predictability, operational risk, compliance constraints, and, most importantly, who is on-call when things go sideways.
Click through for a detailed analysis. It’s a similar story in SQL Server:
Leave a CommentRobin Moffatt looks for alternatives:
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.
In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.
Read on for Robin’s analysis of a half-dozen alternatives.
1 CommentAndrew Pruski builds a virtual machine:
With all the changes that have happened with VMware since the Broadcom acquisition I have been asked more and more about alternatives for running SQL Server.
One of the options that has repeatedly cropped up is KubeVirt
KubeVirt provides the ability to run virtual machines in Kubernetes…so essentially could provide an option to “lift and shift” VMs from VMware to a Kubernetes cluster.
Read on to learn a bit more about KubeVirt, including how to set up a Windows-based virtual machine with it. Andrew does document some performance woes, so that’d be a big concern to work out the why behind this.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino uses a weird operating system, totally different from my perfectly-normal Ubuntu:
SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS, you might have hit a wall trying to get it running. Here’s what happened when I tried spinning up the latest container image and how I worked around it.
Read on to see what happened and how Anthony was able to fix it.
Comments closedEduardo Pivaral uses the MSSQL extension in Visual Studio Code:
You are a developer using SQL Server for your applications, and you need to quickly setup a local development environment. How can you make sure the environment is OS agnostic, so it can run on any operating system? Let’s see how we can quickly create a local container to run SQL Server using the VSCode MSSQL Extension.
Read on for the instructions. I still do the old-fashioned thing of opening up a terminal window and running docker commands, but this is pretty convenient.
This is post two in my series about the Data API Builder (dab), the first post, Data API Builder, covers what dab is and how to test it locally against SQL Server in running in a container. This was great for testing, but now we want to start to productionise this, and the first step is to get it running somewhere other than my laptop.
There are several deployment options available, I recommend you review the Microsoft docs here: Deployment guidance for Data API builder.
ACI wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice for, well, much of anything. However, it is cheap and easy, so it has that going for it.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino announces a new tool:
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker. If you’ve ever needed to run TPC-C or TPC-H benchmarks multiple times, you know how time-consuming the manual setup can be. This project removes the hassle and gets you up and running a single command:
./loadtest.sh.
Click through to learn more about the project and how you can grab the code.
Comments closedJoey D’Antoni defends the defensible:
I’ve seen a couple of posts (of course they were chock full of AI slop images) on LinkedIn in the last couple of weeks, talking about how challenging it is to implement Kubernetes. In the most recent post I saw, it stated that “it took 5 months for our CEO to implement Kubernetes for our app”, to which I would ask, why the hell is your CEO configuring your clusters. I designed, and implemented the Kubernetes infrastructure on my current project, and I’ve worked on for a while, so of course, I felt the need to share my opinions on the matter.
As far as Kubernetes on-premises goes, there are quite valid reasons to run it on-prem. Yeah, it’s easier to host in AKS or EKS, but that’s not always possible. But regardless of whether you’re hosting on-prem or in a cloud provider, Kubernetes requires solid knowledge across several areas, including networking, storage administration, systems administration, and CI/CD, not to mention the development skills needed for containerization.
I think Joey downplays the skill level required, but I don’t want to err in the opposite direction by overstating the challenge. But if you want anything beyond the bog-standard deployment of AKS/EKS, the “You must be this tall to ride the ride” sign is significantly higher than using other containerized solutions like Azure Application Services/Container Apps or Elastic Container Service.
Comments closedDeb Melkin launches a container:
It’s time for another video! This time, join me as I walk through Creating a SQL Server docker container using VS Code. As a bonus, I’ll also show you how to create a PostgreSQL server in a docker container.
Click through for the video, some links, and a transcript.
Comments closed