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Category: Linux

Installing SQL Server on CentOS

Published 2022-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay has a walkthrough for us:

In this article, we will understand how we can manage a SQL Database in CentOS 8.0. This article is the first article on the topic Manage SQL Server on CentOS.

1. Step-by-step Installation of SQL Server and client tools in CentOS

2. Create and connect to the SQL Database

I have created a virtual machine on a workstation and installed CentOS 8.0. First, let us install SQL Server on CentOS.

One quick note is that CentOS is no longer officially supported as a platform for SQL Server on Linux. It’ll still work fine, though if you use it in production and run into a problem, there’s a risk that you wouldn’t be able to get timely support. Still, if you’re just trying it out on a personal device and you like the Red Hat-like experience versus Ubuntu-based distributions, getting Microsoft support isn’t all that relevant.

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SQL Server on Linux: No More GDR Repos

Published 2022-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal makes an announcement:

We would like to announce the recent change made to the Announcing the Modern Servicing Model for SQL Server – Microsoft Tech Community   that applies for SQL Server on Linux/Container releases only. 

We are moving forward with a Linux apt mainstream servicing lifecycle for SQL Server 2017 and later:

1. For SQL Server 2017 and above we will only have Cumulative Update (CU) based General Distribution Releases (GDRs), thus simplifying it for users to download the required updates through one single branch which is the CU (Cumulative Update) branch.  Users need to subscribe and use only one single repository, that is the CU repository, to get all the critical fixes, product improvements or bug fixes.

2. The RTM (Release to Manufacturing) based GDR repository that contained base SQL Server release, critical fixes and security updates since that release, will be removed. As they worked only for older Linux distributions (RHEL 7, Ubuntu 16.04 & SLES 12). 

Read on for the consequences of this.

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Cross-Platform SQL Server Availability Groups

Published 2022-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta shows how to set up an Availability Group in SQL Server which runs on both Windows and Linux:

Microsoft supports SQL Server on Linux, and it has many of the same features as the Windows version. You can restore databases from Windows to Linux SQL or vice versa. The Linux SQL works with Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE enterprise, Kubernetes containers, and Docker.

Windows-based SQL instance supports SQL Server Always On Availability Groups for high availability and disaster recovery. If you are not familiar with Windows AG configuration, refer to the extensive series on Always on Availability Group (Toc at the bottom).

If you have both Windows and Linux SQL Server, is it possible to configure an availability group between them? Let’s explore this in this article.

This example uses async mode, which is the easier one to set up. With synchronous, you’re probably looking at using Pacemaker to sort out AG status.

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SQL Server Container Images and RHEL/Ubuntu Versions

Published 2022-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal announces a change:

To make this approach scalable & manageable, we will publish SQL Server container images to MCR based on the distribution’s most recent version, rather than publishing it for all versions of both RHEL and Ubuntu. Here’s an example to help you understand: 

SQL Server 2017 supports Ubuntu 18.04 as the most recent distribution; thus, going forward SQL Server 2017 container images based on the Ubuntu 18.04 image will only be published to MCR and we will not publish the SQL Server 2017 container images for Ubuntu 16.04.

This seems fine to me. They focus on image support for the most recent fully-supported version and hopefully make it a bit better. I do wonder if that will change their overall Linux policy around version support, as that could be trickier to sell.

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SQL Server 2022 Public Preview on Linux

Published 2022-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal has notes on SQL Server 2022 on Linux:

In continuation of last week’s announcement of SQL Server 2022 public preview, we are pleased to announce availability of SQL Server 2022 on Linux/Containers for public preview. Here are the details for getting started with the SQL Server 2022 public preview packages on Linux/Containers.

As usual, the officially supported distributions are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu.

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Running MSDTC on Linux Containers in Kubernetes

Published 2022-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal reminds us that MSDTC exists:

It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to write and share a blog post about SQL Server containers and Linux. Today, I’d like to show you how to set up and use MSDTC (Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator) to execute distributed transactions for SQL Server containers running on a Kubernetes platform.

Please see the following documentation for more information on DTC and SQL Server on Linux. How to configure MSDTC on Linux – SQL Server | Microsoft Docs.

I kid (sort of) but it is good to see as much parity between the Windows and Linux versions of SQL Server as possible.

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Azure App Service Source Code Breach

Published 2021-12-23 by Kevin Feasel

Catalin Cimpanu reports on a security problem:

Microsoft has notified earlier this month a select group of Azure customers impacted by a recently discovered bug that exposed the source code of their Azure web apps since at least September 2017.

The vulnerability was discovered by cloud security firm Wiz and reported to Microsoft in September. The issue was fixed in November, and Microsoft has spent the last few weeks investigating how many customers were impacted.

Click through for the full report, with the upshot that if you run Azure App Services on Linux, you were probably affected.

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AD Authentication with SQL Server on Linux

Published 2021-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino will have none of your SQL authentication:

In this post, we’re going to walk through configuring Active Directory authentication for SQL Server on Linux. We will start by joining the Linux server to the domain, configuring SQL Server on Linux to communicate to the domain, and then use adutil to create our AD users and set up Kerberos for SQL Server login authentication.

This does take a bit more effort than using Windows authentication, but if you want to use SQL Server on Linux, I’d consider it a worthwhile investment of time.

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Creating an Availability Group on Linux in Azure with Pacemaker

Published 2021-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski slams in all of the exciting nouns:

There are new Ubuntu Pro 20.04 images available in the Azure marketplace with SQL Server 2019 pre-installed so I thought I’d run through how to create a three node pacemaker cluster with these new images in order to deploy a SQL Server availability group.

Disclaimer – The following steps will create the cluster but will not have been tested in a production environment. Any HA configuration for SQL Server needs to be thoroughly tested before going “live”.

Click through to see how.

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