Microsoft Launches SQL Server For Linux

[dragorth]

What they trying to accomplished?

They want to sell you Azure services, and they don't care if you use Windows, Linux or BSD, they still make a profit from your use of their services. Some of the features toted in this release, such as the hosted/cloud hybrid data availability will allow more IT infrastructure to move to Azure, which is a win from their POV.

[fuzz]

While many new products should use Postgres from the ground up, this is a *great* path for migration away from Windows!

[pjezek]

MS has found MSSQL as a bottleneck for multiplaform OS'. Interoperabilty with MSSQL is problematic with serious loss of functionality. The MS' solution can be only make some steps together interoperability with open source SQL servers used by those desired for cooperation by MSSQL users. They can simply switch to MSlinuxSQL server with native support for interoperability with linux SQL servers. Multiplatform interoperability is a key strategy and a trend to overcome historical autonomous MS' development not prepared for general multiplatform interoperability.

[Azrael5]

microsoft has to transit on linux slowly I think that it is going to assimilate linux as operating system in the same way as google made with android.

microsoft knows that the weakness of linux world is the organization and the efficacy of the proposals in the market. and where linux is weak microsoft is strong as marketing organization and hardware monopoly of desktop's market.

So the reason to the rationalization of development of linux teams so to cooperate to the similar projects united instead of fragmented, in a complementarity way. (if microsoft doesn't assimilate linux it risks to disappear).

[boffo]

Basically Microsoft is abandoning Windows for servers and focusing windows for mobile & desktop.

[Cyberax]

Has somebody asked for it? Who is going to buy this?

Lots of people. MSSQL Server is the most developer-friendly SQL server with the best tools available. It's very easy to use and it's quite powerful.

A lot of organizations are keeping a fleet of Windows servers just for MSSQL and ActiveDirectory, with everything else being on Linux. That's a constant operational pain, since Windows Servers don't really have good deployment automation tools like Puppet or cluster management systems like Kubernetes.

Now it'll open way for a much wider use of MSSQL.

[Optic]

SQL databases have long been a commodity. Postgres is very high quality, feature loaded, high performance, and completely absolutely free and there are other high quality free options. The idea of having to buy licenses for a database product is pretty foreign to most developers and businesses.

I'm sure some people will use MSSQL on Linux, I'm sure this will have benefit for Microsoft in some way. Some C# features, AFAIK, only work out of the box with MSSQL and won't work easily or at all with something like Postgres... IMO, that's justification to just avoid C# and MSSQL.

I work frequently with C# at work using Oracle, Postgres, MSSQL, MySQL etc. So far I have not found a single thing I cant do with all of them.
I am by no means know everything about C# but I have done plenty of work with the language and have never had problems. If you did find something it would have to be quite a niche area, not to mention, its a programing language, write a library.

[anarki2]

Basically Microsoft is abandoning Windows for servers and focusing windows for mobile & desktop.

Basically, this is a totally ignorant statement. There's Active Directory, Hyper-V (2016 will have Docker as well), Storage Spaces, iSCSI target with multipath, SMB, DPM, Terminal Server, failover clustering and a horde of other goodies. This is only the 1st party stuff, obviously you have millions of 3rd party applications as well.

You can have a Hyper-V cluster with HA for FREE. This same thing costs you around 5,000 EUR with VMware. If you buy an Action Pack for something like 500 EUR a year, you get DPM for enterprise-level backups (along with a sh*tload of other Microsoft licenses, worth more than 10,000 EUR). For VMware you have to buy Veeam, 650 EUR per CPU socket. If you buy a Datacenter license, you can run UNLIMITED Windows Server VMs on that Hyper-V host. And so on, there's a lot of examples, the point is, Windows Server is great for many scenarios.

It doesn't mean Linux server isn't great, obviously. Each to their own. There's a lot of stuff where Windows Server simply won't make any sense. And vice versa.

[edoantonioco]

This is unexpected, its great news.

[Klassic Six]

They want to sell you Azure services, and they don't care if you use Windows, Linux or BSD, they still make a profit from your use of their services. Some of the features toted in this release, such as the hosted/cloud hybrid data availability will allow more IT infrastructure to move to Azure, which is a win from their POV.

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". It looks like they tired of touching themselves.