Category: Containers

Andrew Pruski has a guide:

I’ve been blogging about running SQL Server in Docker containers for a while now and, to be honest, my blogs are scattered over a few years and some need to be archived as they’re out of date.

So what I wanted to do was have one place where I could collate all the blogs I’ve written about running SQL Server in a container. This would make it easy for people to access information and make it easy for me to keep it all up-to-date as well.

So introducing, The SQL Server and Containers Guide!

Go check it out.

Jamie Wick walks us through containerizing a web application which runs in IIS on Windows:

The basic application documentation provided included a zip file containing the website files along with information that the website was running on a Windows IIS server with passthrough (Active Directory) authentication.

For a Windows Server container to use Active Directory authentication, a Group Managed Service Account (gMSA) must be installed on each server that will be hosting the container. The container’s application must then be configured to run as a Network Service. The last step is to use a Credential File in the docker run command to link the container’s Network Service account to a gMSA on the host.

Note: If you are not familiar with Windows Server containers, Dockerfiles, and the Docker Build process, please refer to this post on Getting started with Windows containers & SQL Server.

Read on as Jamie takes us through the process.

Chris Taylor walks us through updating Docker Desktop for Windows to support Windows Subsystem for Linux 2:

I won’t go too much into what this is as you can read the article in the links above but to summarise, this will improve the experience of docker on windows:

– Improvements in resource consumption
– Starting up docker daemon is significantly quicker (Docker says 10s as opposed to ~1min previously)
– Avoid having to maintain both Linux and Windows build scripts
– Improvements to file system sharing and boot time
– Allows access to some cool new features for Docker Desktop users.

Some of these are improvements we’ve been crying out for over the last couple of years so in my opinion, they’re a very welcome addition.

In order to get started using WSL2, there’s a couple of steps you need to run through which I’ll try and show below with a few screen shots.

Read on for the process.

Andrew Pruski makes it easy to launch a fully-featured Docker container running SQL Server:

The solution here is to create a custom image with the volume created and permissions set.

But wouldn’t it be easier to just have to run one command to spin up a custom 2019 image, with volumes created and permissions set?

Enter Docker Compose.

Andrew has a GitHub repo with everything set up and includes plenty of screenshots to demonstrate.

John Morehouse shows how to use volumes to expose data—such as SQL Server data and log files—to a Docker container:

Over the past couple of blog posts, I have been talking about the versatility of deploying SQL Server with Docker.  This combination is a great way to quickly and easily spin up local SQL Server instances.  In the most recent post, I talked about a method to copy and restore a sample database into a Docker container that is running SQL Server.   In this post, I am going to talk about an easier way to accomplish this by attaching a persistent volume to the container.   With this method you don’t have to copy any files into the container, and it makes the overall process easier and repeatable.

First, before we get into the code, let’s talk about what a volume is.  Essentially, a volume is a location on the host machine that can be referenced by the container.  I think of this as a shared folder that the container can see.  Once attached to the container, it can then read or write to the volume.   You can easily declare the volume when you create the container with a simple switch in the command.

John’s examples are on a Mac, but the concepts are essentially the same for Windows or Linux.