Running SQL Server on Linux: A Practical Guide

SQL Server is one of the most popular relational database management systems in the world. It is widely used by businesses and organizations for storing and managing data. Traditionally, SQL Server has only been available on the Windows platform. However, Microsoft has made SQL Server available on Linux as well. This has opened up new possibilities for businesses and organizations who want to run SQL Server on a different platform. In this article, we will explore how to run SQL Server on Linux, and provide a practical guide for getting started.

Environment Setup

Before we can install SQL Server on Linux, we need to set up our environment. Specifically, we need to make sure that we have the following software installed:

- A Linux distribution that supports SQL Server (e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE)
- Docker
- curl

Once we have these dependencies installed, we can go ahead and install SQL Server.

Installing SQL Server

There are a few different ways to install SQL Server on Linux. Microsoft provides official packages for Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE. We will use the Ubuntu package for this guide. To install SQL Server on Ubuntu, we can follow these steps:

1. Import the public repository GPG keys:

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

2. Register the Microsoft SQL Server Ubuntu repository:

sudo add-apt-repository "$(curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-2019.list)"

Note: This command is for Ubuntu 16.04. If you are using a different version of Ubuntu, you will need to change the 16.04 part of the command to the version you are using.

3. Install SQL Server:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server

4. Once the installation is complete, run the setup script:

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

5. Follow the prompts to configure SQL Server. This includes setting the SA (system administrator) password and accepting the license agreement.

Once these steps are complete, SQL Server will be installed on your Linux machine.

Connecting to SQL Server

Now that we have SQL Server installed, we need to connect to it. We can do this using the SQL Server command-line tools. To connect to SQL Server, we can follow these steps:

1. Install the command-line tools:

sudo apt-get install -y mssql-tools

2. Connect to SQL Server:

sqlcmd -S localhost -U SA -P 

Note: Replace  with the SA password you set during the setup process.

Once connected, we can run SQL commands just as we would on a Windows machine.

Conclusion

Running SQL Server on Linux opens up new possibilities for businesses and organizations who want to use SQL Server on a different platform. In this article, we provided a practical guide for getting started with running SQL Server on Linux. We covered the environment setup, installation, and connecting to SQL Server. With this guide, you should be able to get up and running with SQL Server on Linux in no time.