The world is going crazy: Trump running for president, the Leicester winning the Premier League and now Microsoft releasing its products for Linux! Yes, you read it right. Microsoft has released and will released some of its product for Linux during this year. Do you love SQL Server but you hate Windows Server? No problem! You can use it on your Linux servers.
PowerShell, the Windows flavored shell now on Linux
Microsoft released Powershell for Linux last August on Ubuntu, CentOS and Mac OS X. You can read about it on Azure Blog and Windows PowerShell Blog. Basically they realized that nearly 60 percent of VMs running on Azure where Linux. Lot of clients demanded .Net and PowerShell on Linux to standardize applications on only one operating system.
Lets be clear, if you have worked administrating operating systems on the server side you know that *nix operating systems are far more used than Windows Server. I think this movement was expected to happen sooner or later and happily for us Microsoft just decided to advance on the integration of Microsoft tools on Linux. Lets thanks Satya Nadella, the new MS CEO since February 2016.
If you want to learn PowerShell (which is a really good idea) I recommend you the following resources:
SQL Server, the database for dummies now on Linux
SQL Server for Linux was announced on March 2016. Since then we didn’t have a release available to download, just a few newsletter and a Registration Program for early adopters and ‘guinea pigs’. No information about the Linux systems supported, system requirements, database performance running on Linux, etc.
There is no release date for the Linux version so it is not clear if it will be released as SQL Server 2016 or SQL Server 20XX, I will update you with any news about the Linux version.
What the future will bring…
It is yet unclear what Microsoft will release for Linux in the future. Is this just the beginning of a new era of MS applications running over Linux? Or this is just some kind of crazy experiment? Personally I choose the option A, being limited to a specific OS, Database or technology nowadays is not really smart. My bet? IIS released for Linux in a couple of month, you’ll see 😉