Oh, how wrong I was. Back in the day, all I worked on was Microsoft SQL Server. These days I’m doing some Microsoft SQL Server and a decent amount of Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS cloud work. With all three of those, there’s a lot of Linux in play. Microsoft SQL Server has supported Linux since the release of SQL Server 2017 at Ignite 2017. Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS have both supported Linux since (I believe) they first supported VMs in their cloud platforms (forever is the world of computers).
Back when I had just a few years expense with SQL Server (and IT in general) I also owned and managed a large (at the time) Oracle database which ran on Unix. Once that was no longer my baby to manage, I assumed by *nix carrier was over. And it was, for a while, but now Linux is back and this time in the SQL Server world.
Looking at the servers that DCAC has in our Azure environment, we have more Linux boxes than Windows. Our website runs off of PHP running on a pair of Linux servers. Our database is MySQL running on a couple of Linux server (eventually we’ll move all this over to Azure PaaS, but still running on Linux). The only production servers in Azure that we have running Windows, our the Active Directory domain controllers, one of which also syncs from Active Directory to Azure Active Directory to handle our sign in, Office 365, etc. That’s it. Everything is Linux.
Our lab environment in our CoLo is also a mix of Windows and Linux. We have a few tools that were built by Microsoft that we run that are running on Windows, but we’ve also got a decent amount of Linux in the data center as well. By the time this is published (I’m writing this on the flight to the PASS Summit in November 2018) we’ll have a Docker cluster up and running as well (unless I get lazy and I don’t get up to the CoLo to rack the servers for it). This Docker cluster is Linux based as well and will let us run a bunch more Linux servers as well.
Your point is?
The point that I’m trying to get to in all of this is that if you are a database administrator that thought they were going to stay in the Windows world forever, think again. You have to be an expert in Linux to manage these systems, but you’ll need to understand the difference between Windows and Linux. SQL Server has a few differences between the platforms, and these differences are significant to the platforms. As a Windows DBA you’ll want to be able to navigate the Linux Operating System, and tell your system teams where SQL Server is storing the database files (they are in /var/opt/mssql/data if anyone asks) so that they know which mount points need to be made bigger.
You don’t need to know everything, but the basics of Linux are doing to take you a long way.
Denny
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