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Category: Linux

SQL Server On Linux Is Boring

Published 2016-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey, defying the common opinion (or is he?):

Suddenly though, it was boring. I tested a few Redgate tools (SQL Compare is right there above, connected to Linux) to be sure they worked. No major issues encountered. Great. However, now, it’s just another instance of SQL Server.

I guess I could start complaining that SQL Agent isn’t there… except I’m not that big a fan of SQL Agent, and I can schedule all sorts of stuff to run in Linux using the sqlcmd command line tool.

This is a good kind of boring.

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High Availability On Linux

Published 2016-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

David Bermingham looks at high availability within SQL Server on Linux:

With Microsoft’s recent release of the first public preview of MS SQL Server running on Linux, I wondered what they would do for high availability. Knowing how tightly coupled AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Clustering is to the Windows operating system I was pretty certain they would not be options and I was correct.

Well, the people over at LinuxClustering.Net answered my question on how to provide high availability failover clusters for MS SQL Server v.Next on Linux with this great Step by Step article.

The linked article is amazing.  It uses a piece of third-party software to perform clustering, so it’s not a free solution.  We’ll see if Microsoft is able to build in a full HA solution in the first version of Linux-supported SQL Server, but if not, it looks like there’s an alternative.

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Thinking About Linux Internals

Published 2016-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino speculates on the internals of SQL Server on Linux:

OK, so everyone wants to know how Microsoft did it…how they got SQL Server running on Linux. In this article, I’m going to try to figure out how.

There’s a couple of approaches they could take…a direct port or some abstraction layer…A direct port would have been hard, basically any OS interaction would have had to been looked at and that would have been time consuming and risk prone. Who comes along to save the day? Abstraction. The word you hear about a million times when you take Operating Systems classes in undergrad and grad computer science courses. 🙂

Anthony talks about picoprocesses, which causes me to say that containers (like Docker) are probably the most important administrative concept of the decade.  If you don’t fundamentally get the concept, learning it opens so many doors.

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Cross-Platform Database Restoration

Published 2016-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad walks through restoring a SQL Server database to a new Linux instance:

So, before you start working or trying to restore your Windows SQL Databases to SQL Server on Linux, there are a few things you may need to do. This will involved installing components which are not installed by default when first build your Linux System.

One thing I had to say with confidence! You WILL find all your answer on the internet. Any of the Linux Distro forum have your resolution to any of the issue you may encountered. Also, most of the time you Linux system will tell you (or gives a tip) what do with missing dependencies.

Other than that, there are Linux Application Updater solution to help keep your system up-to-date.

This is an amazing time to be in the SQL Server space.

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Ola’s Jobs On Linux

Published 2016-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni gives a few pointers around SQL Server on Linux, including running Ola Hallengren’s scripts on a system without a SQL Server Agent:

Aside from a couple of DMVs that show you Linux specific performance information, everything in SQL Server on Linux is the same. Some of the HA and DR functionality is not complete, and the SQL Agent is not done, however you can use cron (and if you’re familiar with Linux, you should learn about cron—I’ll have another post on that next week).

These are some good notes, so check it out.

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Installing SQL Server On Ubuntu

Published 2016-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

James Anderson installs SQL Server on Ubuntu:

’m installing Ubuntu 16 on a Hyper-V VM. I’ll be using a generation 1 Hyper-V VM as I’ve had much better luck installing Linux VMs on these. I’ve had boot and performance issues with Linux on Generation 2 VMs.

After installing Ubuntu I followed the instructions in the SQL Server Linux documentation and recorded my progress below.

For Ubuntu we need to register the SQL Server repository before we can use the apt-get package manager to download and install SQL Server.

This step-by-step walkthrough shows that installing SQL Server on Linux is pretty easy:  it’s just a single package (RPM or DEB depending upon your flavor of Linux).

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SQL Server ODBC For Linux 13.0

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Meet Bhagdev reports that a new version of the SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux is available:

What’s new

  • Native Linux Install Experience: The driver can now be installed with apt-get (Ubuntu), yum (RedHat/CentOS) and Zypper (SUSE). Instructions on how to do this is below.

  • AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG): The driver now supports transparent connections to AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The driver quickly discovers the current AlwaysOn topology of your server infrastructure and connects to the current active server transparently.

  • TLS 1.2 support: The driver now supports TLS 1.2 connections to SQL Server.

These are some nice additions.  None of them are groundbreaking, but they add up to a nice release.  Click through for instructions on how to install the driver; it got a lot easier for supported platforms.

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VS Code And Powershell

Published 2016-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad explains how to get Powershell running with Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu:

Using VS Code Debug

First, we are going to use VS Code debug option to run PowerShell Out-Of-The-Box. This way we can be use debug to execute and step thru the PowerShell script code.

Open the folder were the scripts are going to be stored. The first time using the Debug it will ask to create the “launch.json” which is needed in order to execute and debug the script.  Accept the default values as you can change them later if needed.

Read on; it’s a whole new world…

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Service Fabric On Linux

Published 2016-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Russinovich announces that Azure Service Fabric will be available on Linux:

Given its beginnings, Service Fabric supports Windows servers and .NET applications, but many enterprises today run heterogeneous workloads, including Windows and Linux servers, .Net and Java applications, and SQL and NoSQL databases. That’s why I am excited to announce today that the preview of Service Fabric for Linux will be publicly available at our Ignite conference on September 26.  With today’s announcement customers can now provision Service Fabric clusters in Azure using Linux as the host operating system and deploy Java applications to Service Fabric clusters. Service Fabric on Linux will initially be available for Ubuntu, with support for RHEL coming soon.

This isn’t a huge announcement for many people, but it’s a positive sign.

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Powershell All The Things

Published 2016-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad reports that Microsoft is making Powershell a cross-platform language:

This is PowerShell Core only, Alpha Version 6.0.0.9 and there’s a lot of work to do. Bugs and feedback are been submitted as the community are contributing for it success.

This version is also available for Windows 10 / Server 2016 and Windows 8.1 / Server 2012 R2. You can have it side-by-side with the current version of PowerShell.

Max has notes on how to install it on Ubuntu.  Given that Microsoft is bringing Bash to Windows and Powershell to Linux, these are interesting times.

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