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Category: Linux

SQL Server on Linux and the Built-In Administrators Group

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski goes messing around:

When I first started working with SQL on Linux one of the first things I did was to remove the default the [BUILTIN\Administrators] login. This is pretty much standard practice with SQL on Windows as we don’t want administrators on the server to have automatic sysadmin rights into the SQL instance.

But this login makes no sense on Linux as there is no administrators group, so it should be dropped…right?

Andrew then goes on to show us why that’s not right. Read the whole thing.

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Deploying SQL Server with Availability Groups via HPE Serviceguard for LInux and Ansible

Published 2023-11-06 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal packs a lot into a post:

It’s time for a new blog on how Ansible can simplify SQL Server deployment, configuration, and availability. If you’ve read my previous blogs on Ansible for SQL Server installation and configuration, and the pacemaker-based Always On availability group, you know how powerful Ansible can be. Now, let’s talk about HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX), a high availability/disaster recovery solution that provides business continuity for critical applications like SQL Server.

Deploying SQL Server Always On availability groups on HPE SGLX is a fully supported solution for production workloads.

Today, let’s look at how you can configure Always On availability group based on HPE SGLX via Ansible. We have collaborated with our friends in HPE to enable the Ansible based deployment for HPE SGLX with SQL Server. This feature is now available for HPE SGLX 15.10. For this demonstration, you can download the evaluation bits from the ‘My HPE Software Center‘. The Ansible bits with the scripts are available on GitHub: 

Read on for instructions and what you need to make it all work.

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SQL Server 2022 on SuSE Enterprise Linux Now Available in Azure Marketplace

Published 2023-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Arvind Mahadevan has an announcement:

We are pleased to announce that we have worked with both SUSE and Microsoft engineering teams to release the latest SQL Server 2022 on SLES v15 SP5 Azure Marketplace image. This is in alignment with our goal to have the latest SQL Server on Linux Azure Marketplace images.

It’s a short post but does give us an idea of where they’re at on Linux support. Support for Ubuntu 22.04 is still in preview, so I’d expect that to come out soon as well.

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Choosing the Correct Enterprise Edition for SQL on Linux

Published 2023-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal disambiguates two options:

Recently, in one of the meetings with our CSS team (support) we realized that our customers might not be selecting the right Enterprise edition for their SQL Servers deployed on Linux. To learn more about different SQL Server editions please refer: Editions and supported features of SQL Server 2022 – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn.

Thus, through this blog we would like to provide guidance on how you can identify and update the SQL Server to use the right Enterprise edition which should show up in the error log as : “Enterprise Edition: Core-based Licensing (64-bit)” and not “Enterprise Edition (64-bit)” which is only needed in case you need to follow historical licensing agreements that limits to a maximum 20 cores per SQL Server instance.

Read on to learn how you can change the edition if you did indeed goof on the installation.

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Building a Retry Mechanism for sqlcmd in Bash

Published 2023-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz won’t let failure get him down:

Introduction:

Efficiently managing temporary failures and timeouts is crucial in production environments when connecting to databases. In this article, we’ll explore how to implement a retry mechanism with sqlcmd in a Bash script, dynamically increasing timeouts with each failed attempt.

Problem Statement:

Operations can fail due to network issues, overloaded servers, or other temporary problems when interacting with databases. Implementing a retry mechanism helps address these temporary issues without manual intervention.

Read on for the solution script. You could also adapt this to Powershell fairly easily, I think, though if you do go down that road, I’d recommend taking a look at Polly and PsPolly.

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SQL Server on Linux 2022 Available in Preview

Published 2023-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal has an update on SQL Server on Linux:

We are glad to announce that SQL Server 2022 is now available in preview mode for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. For this preview, only Evaluation edition is available, which is limited to 180 days starting Thursday, July 27th, 2023. 

In your Dev/Test environments, you may now take advantage of the most recent SQL Server 2022 improvements on both RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. Currently, production workloads on RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04 are not supported by the SQL Server 2022 preview packages. You can run the production workloads for SQL Server 2022 on RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 22.04 and they are fully supported. 

I’m going to wait until it’s actually available for real, not just in preview.

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PolyBase and S3 Integration in SQL Server 2022 on Containers

Published 2023-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal combines a bunch of things together:

One of the new features introduced with SQL Server 2022 is the ability to connect to any S3-compatible object storage and SQL Server supports both Backup/Restore and data lake virtualization with Polybase integration.  In this blog, we will demonstrate both of these features for SQL Server 2022 Containers running on Kubernetes. As usual, I will use the Azure Kubernetes Service as my Kubernetes environment

Most of the work is in the container configuration, which is good on net, as it means you only have to do it once.

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SQL Server on Windows 11 WSL

Published 2022-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski provides an update on SQL Server running on Windows Subsystem for Linux:

This happens because up until now, WSL did not support systemd. However recently Microsoft announced systemd support for WSL here: –
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-is-now-available-in-wsl/

This is pretty cool and gives us another option for running SQL Server locally on linux (great for testing and getting to grips with the Linux platform).

So how can we get this up and running?

Read on for instructions, as well as a couple pitfalls Andrew ran into along the way.

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Deploying SQL Server via AKS

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta needs to deploy a SQL Server container:

This article uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deploy and manage the Kubernetes cluster. It is a fully managed service that offers serverless Kubernetes with integrated CI/CD solutions, enterprise-grade security, and governance.

You can navigate to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/kubernetes-service/#overview and try Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Read on for an overview of Azure Kubernetes Service and how you can get a SQL Server on Linux container running atop it.

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