Category: Linux

Anthony Nocentino shows how Microsoft is embracing the Linux style by creating a view of DMVs as a filesystem:

Something isn’t right…as DBAs we think of things in rows and columns. So we’re going to count across the top and think the 7th column is going to yield the 7th column and it’s data for each row, right? Well, it will but data processed by awk is whitespace delimited by default and is processed row by row. So the 7th column in the second line isn’t the same as the output in the first line. This can be really frustrating if your row data has spaces in it…like you know…dates.

So let’s fix that…the output from the DMVs via dbfs is tab delimited. We can define our delimiter for awk with -F which will allow for whitespaces in our data. Breaking the data only on the tabs. Let’s hope there isn’t any tabs in our data!

I’m a little surprised that these metrics don’t end up in /proc, but I imagine there’s a reason for that.

David Alcock has a couple posts covering installation of SQL Server on a brand new Ubuntu VM.  First, David installs Ubuntu:

The system requirements for running SQL Server on Ubuntu 16.04.2 contains the following

Note

You need at least 3.25GB of memory to run SQL Server on Linux. For other system requirements, see System requirements for SQL Server on Linux.

On the create VM window the Memory is currently set to 1024 MB so by clicking the Customize Hardware button I can change the allocated memory to 4GB (4096 MB) as in the screenshot below:

Then, he explains the process of installing SQL Server:

Let’s break it down a little bit. First sudo, which is giving root permissions to a particular command this is as opposed to sudo su which I had to do later on in the install to switch to superuser mode for the session.

Next is apt. Apt is a command line tool which works with the Advanced Packaging Tool and enables to perform installs, updates and removals of software packages. In this case we’re installing curl so we use the install command.

I think Microsoft did a good job of simplifying the installation process on Linux and making it “Linux-y,” with an easy installation and then post-installation configuration.

David Klee continues his SQL Server on Linux series with a discussion of basic Linux installation and usage:

You’ll want to learn the syntax for one of the console-based text editors. My personal favorite is ‘vi‘. It’s quick, streamlined, but does have a significant learning curve. Emacs is another editor that works great. Many others are out there, and your options open even more if you’re using a GUI. You’ll need an editor to edit configuration files.

The folder structure of Linux is one of the biggest changes. Whereas Windows is based off of an arbitrary drive-letter assignment system that dates back to the DOS era, Linux is is based off of a tree structure. All folders and files are based on a single point, ‘/’ or the root folder, and everything is based off of folders from this point. Certain folders from Windows, such as C:\Windows, C:\Users\username, or %WINDOWSTEMP%, are mapped to certain folders within the Linux operating system.

This is really high-level stuff; if you’re looking at administering a Linux box in a production environment, I’d highly recommend taking the time to learn Linux in detail.