Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#71

Post by slackfan »

coding123 wrote: post #63
slackfan wrote: post #21

I actually have been running SQL Server for linux for the past few months. In a docker container, no less. This is entirely for testing a part of our application that needs to connect to legacy mssql servers. The server is spun up, databases are created programmatically, tests are run, and then the container is destroyed. As for running this in production, ahahaha no.

I was in this thread looking for this reply. If nothing else, the ability to run code on your Mac laptop running MSSQL server in docker is a huge win, even for what may later be a Windows deployment of MSSQL server. I definitely see the use-case for automating QA workloads and running tests against a real MSSQL server on what is otherwise a fully Linux based build system. The cheapest way to run MSSQL server (TCO whi…

Yeah, it's pretty great. We evaluated spinning up RDS MSsql instances for our testing, and found the time that it took to spin up one of those to be extremely prohibitive for use with CI pipelines, I mean something to the tune of 20 minutes for the instance to come up. Whereas with docker and mssql-linux, we only have to (at most) have a 10-15 second delay before the container is fully online. Definitely great for devs to run their local tests against, and great for me to be able to do some minor admining via the CLI tools provided in the container.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#72

Post by tjoff »

jasode wrote: post #41

If I put on my "CIO" hat, I would say "no". An observation from several decades of the software business is the concept of the "reference platform" . For MS SQL Server, the reference platform is Windows, not Linux. This means that if development for the different operating systems gets out of sync, it will be the Linux version that lags instead of Windows. If I have an urgent crisis with a database down and need to c…

One point to add, the reference platform is going to be much better tested and battle proven both in-house and in practice.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#73

Post by neilsimp1 »

cwyers wrote: post #57
131012 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on point 3? If the argument is ideological, I get it. I'm more interested in the technical argument.

Oracle is a fine enough database (it really is), but it costs an exceptional amount of money and (I haven't touched it in a long time so I may be out of date on this, but I don't think I am) the developer tool experience is not great. Oracle SQL Developer is ugly and slow compared to SQL Server Management Studio. Basically, if you've used both Oracle and SQL Server you can tell which company had their CEO on stage sh…

> Oracle SQL Developer is ugly and slow compared to SQL Server Management Studio

This cannot be said enough. I've recently changed positions to a team using Oracle, coming from MSSQL, and dammit if I don't hate SqlDeveloper.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#74

Post by pritambaral »

cwyers wrote: post #57
131012 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on point 3? If the argument is ideological, I get it. I'm more interested in the technical argument.

Oracle is a fine enough database (it really is), but it costs an exceptional amount of money and (I haven't touched it in a long time so I may be out of date on this, but I don't think I am) the developer tool experience is not great. Oracle SQL Developer is ugly and slow compared to SQL Server Management Studio. Basically, if you've used both Oracle and SQL Server you can tell which company had their CEO on stage sh…

> and which is run by the lawnmower.

More on this reference, the brilliant slam down of Oracle by Bryan Cantrill: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1981

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#76

Post by james_anderson »

manigandham wrote: post #64
mindcrime wrote: post #8

No, almost certainly not. Why would I use MSSQL in the first place, when I could just use PostgreSQL? The main reason I could see to use MSSQL would be "you're in a Windows shop already", and if that isn't the case, I don't see much reason for it.

MSSQL is fast. It's seamless to use with .NET code and it has several features like columnstores, in-memory tables and graph processing that are very useful. Also availability groups are much better than Postgres solutions for high availability today.

I really like AGs but I'm not sure I will love them on Linux. It still feels like it's early days for SQL Server's HA on Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#77

Post by manigandham »

james_anderson wrote: post #76
manigandham wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSSQL is fast. It's seamless to use with .NET code and it has several features like columnstores, in-memory tables and graph processing that are very useful. Also availability groups are much better than Postgres solutions for high availability today.

I really like AGs but I'm not sure I will love them on Linux. It still feels like it's early days for SQL Server's HA on Linux.

That's true, although I'm looking forward to a far easier AG setup without Windows Clustering now.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#78

Post by Neckmeats »

snuxoll wrote: post #52
hungerstrike wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have said the same thing if I had never used MSSQL. PG just doesn't have the same quality SQL-dialect or tools as MSSQL though. Some very basic facilities are missing from PG like snapshot and transaction logs, batched triggers and being able to return multiple resultsets from a single trip to the database server. Even the free tools for SQL Server are better than anything you can get for PG and there's nothi…

> PG just doesn't have the same quality SQL-dialect or tools as MSSQL though. T-SQL sucks, I don't know how on earth you get the feel of "quality" from it. Every time I have to work with it I cry, pl/pgsql is a hell of a lot nicer and I can feel comfortable stating that as an objective. As far as GUI tooling? Ya got me there, even as terrible as auto-complete is in SSMS it's leaps and bounds better than PGAdmin or Da…

How about some features that really matter for an enterprise... compare the differences of HA options between PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Or maybe something a little more simple like point in time recovery. Backup and recovery is probably the most important feature of an enterprise RDBMS, and I'm sorry, but PostgreSQL doesn't cut it. It's really fun to develop on, but it's an absolute nightmare to administer. That makes it a liability.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#79

Post by Neckmeats »

jenkstom wrote: post #43
hungerstrike wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have said the same thing if I had never used MSSQL. PG just doesn't have the same quality SQL-dialect or tools as MSSQL though. Some very basic facilities are missing from PG like snapshot and transaction logs, batched triggers and being able to return multiple resultsets from a single trip to the database server. Even the free tools for SQL Server are better than anything you can get for PG and there's nothi…

Then again, T-SQL is a developer's nightmare. Especially when compared to PostgreSQL's version of SQL scripting. And when you add on all the supported languages it makes MSSQL quite painful from a SQL developer standpoint.

This sounds like more of a religious issue than anything. All of the dialects of SQL have pros and cons, but if you stick as close to the ANSI standard as possible, the differences are negligible. If today's developers actually cared about relational theory, and spent the time to do it right, they wouldn't really care much of the difference between T-SQL or any other dialect. Like when developers bring up a platform preference based on JSON data type support... you're doing it wrong to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: Would you consider running SQL Server on Linux?

#80

Post by anarazel »

Neckmeats wrote: post #78
snuxoll wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PG just doesn't have the same quality SQL-dialect or tools as MSSQL though. T-SQL sucks, I don't know how on earth you get the feel of "quality" from it. Every time I have to work with it I cry, pl/pgsql is a hell of a lot nicer and I can feel comfortable stating that as an objective. As far as GUI tooling? Ya got me there, even as terrible as auto-complete is in SSMS it's leaps and bounds better than PGAdmin or Da…

How about some features that really matter for an enterprise... compare the differences of HA options between PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Or maybe something a little more simple like point in time recovery. Backup and recovery is probably the most important feature of an enterprise RDBMS, and I'm sorry, but PostgreSQL doesn't cut it. It's really fun to develop on, but it's an absolute nightmare to administer. That mak…

Think there's plenty of missing tooling around postgres. But what are you lacking in backup with http://www.pgbackrest.org/ ? Or is it just that it's a separate package?
Post reply on HN