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Category: Containers

Getting Started With Linux

Published 2018-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a new series on learning Linux for SQL Server DBAs:

As this series of articles are published, it will be important that you have a way to do some hands on with Linux, not just read about this powerful operating system. To accomplish this, my recommendation is to download Docker for Windows.

Choosing to use Docker over a VM or a cloud deployment might seem odd at first, but I’ve found that Docker is the perfect option from the testing and classes I’ve led. The Docker image is light–using a minute number of resources on any laptop. Access to the docker image isn’t dependent upon Wi-Fi or the user having a cloud account. The image, for the most part, offers an experience that is incredibly similar to a full Linux server in functionality for no additional cost.

Once you’ve downloaded Docker and have it installed, create a Linux container with SQL Server on your workstation, (thanks to Microsoft) to work with and build your knowledge. Start by opening a Command Prompt, cmd from the search option in Windows.

This post is mostly setup and updating packages.  I also want to pitch We Speak Linux if you’re in this boat.  Kellyn did our inaugural webinar, too.

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Tips For SQL Server On Linux + Docker

Published 2018-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a set of tips for working with SQL Server on Linux using Docker:

Easy Download

Docker is available for Mac and Windows with a simple installation by the defaults.

  1. Download the correct installation for your OS type.
  2. Run the installer and keep all the defaults, choosing Linux containers, not Windows containers
  3. Reboot Windows workstations- Done.

Incredibly Simple MSSQL Container Install

Microsoft has done a great job of creating a very small, (maybe a bit too small, but we’ll get into that later…) image that can be used to create a running Linux container with SQL Server.  This grants to student a great opportunity to simulate much of what it would be like to work on a real Linux server.

Click through to read the whole thing.  And Kellyn’s not kidding about the image missing basic packages.

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Running Apache Kafka On Kubernetes

Published 2018-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rohit Bakhshi walks us through how to install Kafka on a Kubernetes cluster:

Now available on GitHub in developer preview are open-source Helm Chart deployment templates for Confluent Platform components. These templates enable developers to quickly provision Apache Kafka, Apache ZooKeeper, Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, and Kafka Connect on Kubernetes, using official Confluent Platform Docker images.

Helm is an open-source packaging tool that helps you install applications and services on Kubernetes. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of YAML templates that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources.

For stateful components like Kafka and ZooKeeper, the Helm Charts use both StatefulSets to provide an identity to each pod in the form of an ordinal index, and Persistent Volumes that are always mounted for the pod. For stateless components, like REST Proxy, the Helm Charts utilize Deployments instead to provide an identity to each pod. Each component’s charts utilize Services to provide access to each pod.

Read on for more.

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SSL Provider Error: 31 With SQL Server In Docker

Published 2018-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski walks us through fixing a connection error:

I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 16.04 and ran into an issue when connecting SQL Operations Studio (version 0.31.4) to SQL 2017 CU9 running in a docker container. Other people seem to encountering this issue as well so am posting it so that it may be of some help to someone in the future.

The error generated was: –

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 31)

The full error can be viewed here

Read on for the solution.

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SQL Server On Containers Q&A

Published 2018-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino walks us through questions he received after his PASS marathon session on SQL Server and containers:

  • How do SQL Containers work with High Availability and Disaster Recovery?

  • Backups and data persistency are primary concerns here. You still need to care and feed for your SQL Server databases just as if they were platformed on a full operating system. For HA, Microsoft has some guidance on how to use Kubernetes to provide HA services to your SQL Server containers here. What I want you to think about when using containers for SQL Server is deploying a new container is VERY fast. We want to be able to persist the data and be able to stand up a new container and mount our data inside that container. Using this technique we can restore SQL Services very quickly with low RTO. That itself is an interesting way to provide HA services without any additional technologies.

Read on for more Q&A and check out Anthony’s presentation.

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Connecting GitHub To Azure Container Registry

Published 2018-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski automates the generation of SQL Server Docker images in Azure Container Registry, generating a new image with each GitHub repo check-in:

Fantastic, one build task created! How easy was that??

Let’s test by running: –

az acr build-task run --registry TestContainerRegistry01 --name buildsqlimage

And the progress of the build task can be monitored: –

az acr build-task logs --registry TestContainerRegistry01

Andrew gives us the step-by-step details, so check it out.

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Deploying SQL Server Code Using Jenkins

Published 2018-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin has started a series on continuous integration of SQL Server databases with Jenkins and Docker:

The mainstay of my presentation material this year has been my deck on continuous integration, Docker and Jenkins. For people who have not had the chance to see this presentation or have seen it and wanted to get some more context around it, I have written this first in a series of posts. Much, in fact just about all of the material in this post features in other posts on my blog. The aim of this set of posts is to present the material in a more digestible manner for people who might not be fully fully familiar with Docker and Jenkins.

This first post will cover an introduction to Jenkins and use of the “Sidecar pattern” for deploying DACPACs to. Subsequent posts will expand on this to include:

  • Multi branch build pipelines
  • Parallelism
  • Unit testing with tSQLt
  • The management of database state via Docker volumes

Many people in the SQL Server community have displayed a great interest in containers, only to be left scratching their heads thinking “Well, that is nice, but what can I practically use them for ?”. In my humble opinion, spinning up SQL Server inside a container as a deployment target for a continuous integration pipeline, is one of the, if not the best ways to leverage SQL Server and Docker.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

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Deplaying A Container On Azure

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows us how to deploy an Azure Container Instance:

The code should be fairly self explanatory. I’m using the username and password created earlier to access the ACR and am then spin up a container from the sqlserverlinuxagent:latest image. The container has 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory available to it and it will be listening on a public IP address on port 1433 (be very careful with this).

At the time of writing, the only option available for ip-address is public, hopefully further options will be available soon. I will update this blog if/when that happens.

Read on for a demo.

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