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Category: Linux

Changing SQL Server on Linux Editions

Published 2026-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea swaps the edition:

In this post I cover the steps required to change (downgrade or upgrade) the edition of a SQL Server instance running on Linux.

In my previous post I’ve went through the steps of installing SQL Server 2025 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
While the process is pretty straight-forward, there might be cases where someone can accidentally specify the wrong edition and only notice afterwards.

Luckily, the edition can be changed with just a few commands.

It’d be neat if it worked the same way for Windows.

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25 Years of SQL Server Central

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has a retrospective:

The oldest article we have on the site is Tame Those Strings! Part 4 – Numeric Conversions, by me. It’s dated 2001-04-18, though I think that’s a date we picked when we converted all the content from one database to another. The founders agreed sometime during Feb 2001 to jointly run SQL Server Central. Since we each owned the copyright of our articles from another site, we migrated several articles to build up our content library. This was back when Andy, Brian, and I all had full-time jobs and managed the site during breaks, nights, and weekends.

That was 25 years ago.

I think there are a lot of DBAs who cut their teeth on SQL Server with the help of SSC. I know I was one of them, having been a SQL Server Central e-mail subscriber for a very long time. Not 25 years, but 15+, at least.

It was one of the best pieces of advice I received from a poker buddy who was a database architect: first thing in the morning, spend about 20 minutes reading articles. It’s time that nobody else will come in to bother you, and you can focus on learning and self-growth without needing to follow the ebbs and flows of the day.

That blended quite well with some good advice from Sean McCown to set aside an hour a day for learning and experimenting.

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Building an Ubuntu VM from Powershell Script

Published 2026-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea has a script:

I needed a fresh Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox this weekend so I figured I can take this opportunity to refresh my PowerShell based process.

Prerequisites

For this VM I’m using the following:

  • Oracle VirtualBox 7.2.6 r172322 running on a Windows host.
  • The installation media (ISO file) for Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS.
  • 51GB of available space on the drive where the VM will live.
    Note that the default Ubuntu install is ~10GB, but I want the extra space to be able to install other stuff later on.

Click through for the script and explanation of the process. It’s not entirely automated, but Vlad does get to the Ubuntu installation point via Powershell and then takes it up from there.

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SQL Server Container Startup Scripts

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Installing SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition on Linux

Published 2025-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta tries out a new edition available in SQL Server 2025:

In the article “Install SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition,” we explored the installation of SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition on the Windows platform. SQL Server 2025 (Preview) also works on Linux editions, and it is equally important to cover the installation steps. Let’s see how we can install it on an AWS EC2 instance running Ubuntu.

The first half of the article covers spinning up an EC2 instance. Interestingly, the prompt to choose your edition of SQL Server was only partially updated—it still asks for you to choose an option between 1 and 10, but there are now 11 options available and I’m now curious if the conditional logic in the script to choose your edition works if you want to use Enterprise Core. Rajendra does note an error message that pops up around licensing, but that could be a release candidate thing.

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Linux and NUMA

Published 2025-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Travers provides an overview of NUMA:

This entry in the series focuses on the low-level hows and whys of Non-Uniform Memory Access so that it is possible to understand the solutions and recommendations later with a focus on conceptual details.  Unfortunately in many details this requires focusing on technical details as often the concepts without the details are confusing at best.

Read on for a quick history of NUMA and what options are available in the Linux kernel.

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Linux Huge Pages and PostgreSQL

Published 2025-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid explains the value of huge pages when running PostgreSQL:

Huge pages are a Linux kernel feature that allocates larger memory pages (typically 2 MB or 1 GB instead of the normal 4 KB). PostgreSQL’s shared buffer pool and dynamic shared memory segments are often tens of gigabytes, and using huge pages reduces the number of pages the processor must manage. Fewer page‑table entries mean fewer translation‑lookaside‑buffer (TLB) misses and fewer page table walks, which reduces CPU overhead and improves query throughput and parallel query performance. The PostgreSQL documentation notes that huge pages “reduce overhead … resulting in smaller page tables and less CPU time spent on memory management”

One thing I found interesting here was the advice for PostgreSQL is to disable Transparent Huge Pages whereas in SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft’s recommendation is to keep THP enabled.

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Running SQL Server 2022 on Ubuntu 24.04

Published 2025-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Laerte Junior gives it a go:

Microsoft does not yet support this edition of Ubuntu, but there are some workarounds to make it work. This should not be used for production usage and this blog is for educational/testing purposes only.

For my installation, I am using an AWS EC2 Ubuntu 24.04 with 2 GB of Ram. 2GB of RAM is the minimum required. This guide is targeted towards people who have installed SQL Server on previous versions of Ubuntu.

Laerte got it to work, but honestly, I’d rather wait for official support, especially if you’re stuck installing older versions of security-related packages (libldap vs the libldap2 that exists on Ubuntu 24.04).

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Testing a SQL Server Operation with a Container

Published 2025-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret performs a test:

Today, my colleague wanted to quickly test out some dbatools commands to install the Ola Hallengren maintenance solution. They had a local instance of SQL installed, but it already had the maintenance jobs running, so it wasn’t a fresh, out of the box instance.

So let’s spin a SQL Server instance in seconds to test against! (Ok it’s seconds if you have the pre-requisites installed, but I’ll get you setup in a few minutes if not)!

Click through for a primer on using SQL Server in a container.

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