Microsoft Brings SQL Server To Linux (betanews.com) 314
Mark Wilson writes: The new Microsoft has place an increased importance on the cloud, and with other companies following suit, reliance on server solutions has increased. Today the company announces that it is bringing SQL Server to Linux. Both cloud and on-premises versions will be available, and the news has been welcomed by the likes of Red Hat and Canonical. Although the Linux port of SQL Server is not due to make an appearance until the middle of next year, a private preview version is being available to testers starting today. While the full launch of SQL Server for Linux is not due until the middle of 2017, SQL Server 2016 is expected to launch later this year.
Haha (Score:2, Funny)
April 1st isn't for another month silly.
Re:Haha (Score:4, Insightful)
If the new Slashdot overlords are seeing this:
Can we please get through April 1st (and the days around it) without any stupid fake / "joke" shit making it to the front page?
Re:Haha (Score:5, Funny)
It's a Slashdot tradition to have joke stories on April 1st. Think of it as payback for all the times you troll.
Re:Haha (Score:5, Funny)
It's one thing to have a joke or two but it's another thing to replace all the real news, all day long, with lame fake stories that aren't funny at all.
Believable ideas for April 1st jokes:
- New Quad-Core Raspberry Pi! Oh crap, that's a real thing already.
- Microsoft giving away free copies of Windows! Damnit...
- Apple releasing a new Mac mini that's weaker than the previous models! Oh wait...
I don't even know what's real anymore.
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The word joke implies that humor is involved. I can assure you none of that happens on April 1st.
Haha (Score:4, Funny)
April 1st isn't for another month.
I thought I heard something (Score:3, Funny)
That explosion and mushroom cloud was Steve Ballmer's head exploding.
Re:I thought I heard something (Score:4, Funny)
Oh Boy! A new MS Licensing Category (Score:2, Insightful)
Just what Linux needed!
And in other news, Satan buys a down jacket... (Score:4, Funny)
...as temperatures reportedly fall all over hell.
Re:And in other news, Satan buys a down jacket... (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux is actually pretty important for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.
Did you know that Microsoft even has a Linux certification? They do [microsoft.com]
Re:And in other news, Satan buys a down jacket... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they need something reliable to run their platform on. :)
Embrace, extend.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Embrace, extend.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not "embrace, extend, extinguish", but a classic bait ("SQL Server on Linux!!!) and switch ("but if you want all the features, buy Windows Server.")
Re: Embrace, extend.... (Score:2)
We call it "freemium model". Try to keep up. Bonus: Here's a text editor for £0.99 if you want it without advertising banners :)
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That's not at all what a bait and switch is.
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That's not at all what a bait and switch is.
I dunno. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bait%20and%20switch [merriam-webster.com] a sales tactic in which a customer is attracted by the advertisement of a low-priced item but is then encouraged to buy a higher-priced one seems pretty much what I wrote, since the core-only Linux-version will be cheaper than the full-featured Windows version.
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I don't the OP meant SQL language features. Like Excel on OS X still can't import XML data, what limitations will the Linux version of SQL Server have?
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There is no Red Hat SQL Server product from Red Hat. They use Mariadb [fedoraproject.org] or MySQL [mysql.com], depending upon the distribution version. So we can readily state emphatically, and with glee, that Red Hat will not embrace and extend their SQL offering ;-)
The Linux community is extinguishing Linux. (Score:2, Insightful)
If Microsoft wanted to extinguish Linux, they wouldn't even have to do a damn thing these days.
The Linux community is doing a superb job of extinguishing Linux all on its own.
Regardless of what you think about it, systemd has caused massive disruption within the Linux ecosystem.
The Debian project, which for a long time was the premiere Linux distribution, has been torn apart by its decision to use systemd.
Lots of other Linux users have had systemd cause them serious problems, including computers that would
Re:The Linux community is extinguishing Linux. (Score:5, Insightful)
All examples of the second system effect. Bloated elephantine solutions to simple problems.
PulseAudio is much worse than OSS. All we needed was mixing. Instead, because they hated the OSS dev, they wrote ALSA (which was a mess). At one point Linus was actively refusing to include ALSA in the kernel. He only accepted it after OSS had no developer. BSD continued using OSS, rewrote the code, added mixing and it works fine there. Because ALSA was a mess from the userspace all sorts of bloated userspace APIs grew on top of it including PulseAudio. That latency addicted sound system. I still remember when I thought OpenAL was going to be *the* user space API. It did everything one needed and it was open-sourced by creative. But for whatever godforsaken reason someone had to come up with PulseAudio and make that standard.
People have been trying to replace X since it came out. The fact is X is perfectly fine as an architecture. Perhaps the higher-end elements of the API don't need to be there (e.g. Xt) but the alternatives to replace X11 proper have lasted less than X has.
As for systemd... All I want to know is why I need to reboot my OS every time I do an Ubuntu update. It didn't use to be necessary. Linux has dynamic loadable module support, every app used to be able to be clearly shutdown and restarted. So why the going back to the Microsoftian past and away from UNIXian roots?
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All I want to know is why I need to reboot my OS every time I do an Ubuntu update. It didn't use to be necessary.
Because Ksplice was acquired by Oracle: http://www.zdnet.com/article/o... [zdnet.com]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ksplic... [ubuntu.com]
Re:The Linux community is extinguishing Linux. (Score:4, Insightful)
Systemd has nothing to do with the kernel. Seems the one spreading fud and trolling is you, not parent poster.
OSS still works, ALSA just just fine and plays well together with, for example jack.
Now along comes pulseaudio, like an elephant in a porcelain cabinet. It breaks everything that works. It has latency like hell. Depsite being userland and taking full control of all hardware, it still crashes like hell, needs restarts - admittingly later versions got a bit better as far stability goes but for some reasons distributions like to stick to old stuff.
Pulseaudio is broken like hell. It doens't play nice with other software, causing more problems than it solves. It already has it's tentacles everywhere, be it bluetooth or desktop or other packages, that somehow need a pulse-related library even if it's not used. It's instable. It's gui is user-unfriendly, both noob and pro users, and it needs the console for better configuration, module loading and other stuff. You can (try to) disable it, or selected sound cards, while it's installed, but will still manage to bork your system. The only fix for pulseaudio is a apt-get autoremove pulseaudio.
We have mixing. We have a fine volume control. The idea behind pulse-audio, userland volume control and patching, is nice, but worked out badly. I do not dislike pulseaudio per-se as it also has lots of uses. But it's far from finished and at least up to version 6 it's buggy as hell.
Now, this same person that devved pulseaudio, would have had my respect if he stayed on the project and actually fixed all shit that is broken. Instead, he went to a new project which gives me the impression that instead only audio, my entire system is about to get borked.
That is primary fear that people have and they are _right_. Not every situation requires fast boot times. On my desktop, i don't care at all as it's easy to just go for another distro or upgrade whenever i feel like. For the average server or serious workstation, there are entire other priorities than shaving off 5 second boottime, which is effectively all that systemd is good for.
I'm not lover or hater. I love that people put work in possibly important projects. But i also do like that the basic components i actually need and use work as intended. That, is why it always should be an option. Pulse is fine - as option. Systemd is fine - as an option. Remove the optionality and people are getting rightfully upset. And both mentioned projects by same person seem to have same attitude regarding that - removing optionality and taking over - as an all or nothing deal. That's the real issue here.
Re: The Linux community is extinguishing Linux. (Score:3)
You do know Apple abandoned init a decade ago right with it's own event driven system? I don't see this a big deal on desktops
Re: The Linux community is extinguishing Linux. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm still trying to figure out why the Linux community reinvented that wheel with systemd. Apple open-sourced their launchd over a decade ago when they replaced init. Now we have something that does the same job on Linux, but is far more complicated and far less documented.
Good times.
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Stacker / Doublespace. QDOS / CP/M / DR-DOS. Mosaic / Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer. etc
You can't even GIVE your software away. Microsoft will try to squelch all dissension in the places were it matters like their government accounts regardless of what means are necessary. Munich shows this quite clearly.
Re: Embrace, extend.... (Score:2)
Re: Embrace, extend.... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're managing SQL Server via GUI, you're doing it wrong.
Re: Embrace, extend.... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, having dealt with MSSQL for most of the last 20 years, I'll say this much.
While MSSQL can be a tetching beast at times, the SSMS interface is surprisingly useful.
If I need to, I can chuck command line all day.
But if I don't need to, and I'm going to be spending a lot of time doing multiple tasks in a single SQL server instance, there are worse ways to do it than SSMS.
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Run the scripts from within SSMS query windows.
Windows No Longer King at MS (Score:5, Interesting)
On mobile Microsoft has pretty much given up and support Android and iOS as well or better than Windows Mobile now now on the Server side we've already seen .Net moving fast to Linux and now the third biggest lock in application on Windows Server(AD and Exchange being bigger) is coming to Linux. With AD and Exchange being pushed more towards hosted services in the cloud, Windows' future doesn't look too bright there.
Re:Windows No Longer King at MS (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin is more about enhancing the market share of the toolsets than "giving up" on Windows.
Compiling for Windows is ridiculously easy with Xamarin, and with the acquisition I can see them enhancing the toolset for Android and iOS to make this easier than it is now.
I believe that this is more about making SQL Server skills (programming, not administration) more compatible across platforms, which enables people to learn one technology and move platforms easier.
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Wait, how do you have a starting score of -1?
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I've given the math and process some logical thinking. That means it's likely wrong. Based on my observations (and guesses as to the mechanisms) you're kind of screwed until you get it back up there.
However, your comment makes me curious... I thought the most one could accumulate would be a -1 total ranking. It should be (if my observations are correct - and it appears they might not be) that a single comment gets to go below a total of -1 and any votes beyond that don't actually help/hinder.
Unfortunately,
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...which enables people to learn one technology and move platforms easier.
People would be better served by learning PostgreSQL. It's very liberating.
An idea (Score:5, Funny)
How long.... (Score:3)
How long before we see a version of "Microsoft Linux"?
You laugh now, but I can see them glomming onto Linux, especially as more businesses and desktop move over to Linux.
And yes, of course it will have subtle incompatibilities that grow more and more pronounced over time. That's what it's all about with Microsoft.
"MS Linux- Because We Care" or maybe, MS Linux- The Most Stable OS We've Ever Produced!*
-
* and by "produced", we mean "stolen"
Re:How long.... (Score:5, Informative)
"How long before we see a version of "Microsoft Linux"?"
About six months ago
https://azure.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
Re:How long.... (Score:4)
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If they were to open source Windows, Windows would no longer be their exclusive leverage to push their other products. It will therefore never happen, unless maybe Windows falls below 10% desktop/laptop market share. Windows Phone, maybe, but unlikely.
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It won't be Microsoft's first trip through Unix land if they do. Anyone remember Microsoft Xenix?
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Because of licensing I can see them going with a *BSD first.
Right after Apple Unix, based on BSD, running on (Score:2)
Microsoft moving releasing a desktop *nix is about as likely as Apple doing so. And running it on Intel chips. ;) It could certainly happen.
* Fyi for anyone who didn't happen to know, OS X is certified UNIX (tm).
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How long before we see a version of "Microsoft Linux"?
I'd be way cool with that, as long as they get rid of the command line and include Cortana.
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How long before we see a version of "Microsoft Linux"?
Don't you mean Windows Server 2018?
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There is a Microsoft product I would be willing to buy though.
Imagine Microsoft releases the Windows Interface Layer. Allowing you to run all your windows applications on any platform.
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Actually, it could be a very good business move - have a M$ desktop to compete with KDE, gnome etc..a M$ wine - Reduce the cost of supporting their cash cow - allow running native Linux programs.
At some point they have to ask what their business model of the future is - what they have isn't going to last. M$ office is a money maker - many other ventures continue to simply bleed. Win10 is most making their customers distrustful. Without the sweetheart ( Cartel socialism) government deals they have, they w
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"At some point they have to ask what their business model of the future is"
Renting and certifications, of course.
Postgresql (Score:2)
Re:Postgresql (Score:5, Informative)
I don't see how SqlServer can compete against Postgresql. The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with .Net framework.
.. and real stored procedures.
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I don't see how SqlServer can compete against Postgresql. The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with .Net framework.
.. and real stored procedures.
What features do stored procedures provide that can't be handled with postgresql functions?
Outside of starting and ending transactions within the function I can't think of anything. Parameters can be input or output and you can modify tables. These are normally things that people with an SQL Server background believe can't be done within functions but in postgres they can.
Postgres isn't a perfect database but it's extremely powerful with new features being added all the time. It has a lot to offer for
Re:Postgresql (Score:5, Interesting)
You're under the impression that businesses only care about a free pricetag.
Businesses care about the lowest price that gets you the best support. I spent months trying to find a DBA who knew anything about Postgres, but if you have an opening for SQL server, you need a frontloader to get through the crowd of them.
Yeah, few, if any of them are what you'd call geniuses, but I really only need one or two geniuses at a time to tell the data monkeys what to do. And if I have to pay genius rates for a data monkey, then perhaps I'm willing to pay for a database something that has higher adoption and high integration.
SQL Server is no slouch for features and while it is not free, you have a better pool for support and integration.
Note, aside from being unable to find a Postgres data monkey, that isn't my story. I don't use SQL Server, but I have the luxury of knowing how to operate a SQL database myself, so I just sucked it up. For businesses where that isn't really an option, I can see why they might want SQL Server. And indeed, many, many businesses do use it.
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If you're concerned about installation and support, you can get it through Enterprise DB and other sources. The postgres community is also an excellent source of support. I've been using postgres for close to 15 years and I've never ran into a problem that made me wish I had some sor
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TL;DR version:
Q: What does Stored Procedures provide that you don't get with PostgreSQL functions?
A: A pricetag.
I'm not really sure if you are arguing for or against MS SQL Server.
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It strikes me as unusual as well. Almost every developer I've met has used PostgreSQL or MySQL at some point, and many of them knew it well. SQL server, maybe the odd one or two who worked on MS stuff. May be biased by working mainly with open source developers of course, but my experience is that there are plenty of people with PostgreSQL expertise around.
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"I think you're better off avoiding stored procedures unless one can prove a significant performance benefit"
Because? Data integrity belongs to the data manager.
"I prefer all my code in ONE place"
If you think "your" code should be the only one accessing *my* data, think it twice: it's not yours to lock it out. And once *my* data gets to be accessed from more than one place, I want data integrity/access rules to be centralized for them all where they belong: the data manager.
I might be wrong, but you look
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What features do stored procedures provide that can't be handled with postgresql functions?
For me database independence is important. Stored procedures let me do that. I can move from MS SQL to MYSQL or even something like HSQLDB if I wanted. All I need to do is write a procedure for said database and point my application to that database. No change in application code.
Hardcoding the SQL in your application marries you to the database you choose. I see stored procedures as a prenup agreement for databases. We get married but if you become a pain in the ass I can easily move on without losing half
Re:Postgresql (Score:4, Insightful)
And performance, and scalability, and encryption, and replication, and backup / restoration, and reporting / analysis, and tuning / optimization, and...
MS wears some big ol' clown shoes (see my recent submission about the botched Win 10 update), but SQL Server, with all its various components, is an industry-leading product for good reason. The only other solution I've seen serious people use is Oracle, and they only admit to it sheepishly, like a shamed victim.
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Page based locking, best when used for contiguous pages for a small portion of the table
Table lock, fastest lock, but Amdahl's law hates this for many write locks.
Data structures are important for performance tuning and in SQL, relations and tables are the structures. You can't design databases with just set theory. You need to understand how the engines work if you want them to perform well. SQL server does a very good job with great performanc
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ported large cluster from SQL Server to Postgres.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's one data point - based on from experience migrating a pretty big system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres, I think the two biggest advantages Postgres has are:
GIST and GIN indexes (and soon BRIN indexes), and
Writeable CTEs.
We migrated a very busy, pretty large (24 CPU core, 256GB RAM, 20TB disk space) system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres about a year ago. These graphs measuring CPU and disk activity provide a nice visualization of the improvement:
http://imgur.com/a/bp2ky [imgur.com]
Note that with [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article], all 24 CPU cores in the system were over 40% utilized (and growing) 24x7 most days a year. After a pretty naive port (November to May in the graph) the CPU load fell to an average of about 10%, and the disk array's queue length fell from painful to near zero. After adding some Postgres-specific code, we got it down to an average of near 5% (shown in the most recent month in the graph).
CPU differences seem to have been mostly related to the availability of GIN indexes in Postgres, which can be much more efficient on certain types of data (like the OpenStreetMap road network).
Disk I/O improvements seems to be mostly related to Postgres's far more compact storage of XML data. Seems SQL Server stores XML data using 2-bytes-per-character for the data itself; and on top of that adds extremely large indexes. In contrast, the "toast" feature in Postgres means the XML data takes an average of less than one byte per character for the data and its "functional index" feature allowed for far more compact indexes. One of our XML-heavy databases went from over 600GB in SQL Server down to 140GB in Postgres, with more efficient indexes.
For a few months we tried to stay database-agnostic so it'd be easy to port back if we needed to -- but after a while we started adding Postgres specific changes. The benefits of those Postgres specific changes can be seen near the end of those graphs. An enormous improvement occurred when we changed the inserts and updates to use the Writable CTE features following recommendations someone outlined here [blogspot.com]
.
In the end, Postgres looks to me like it's saving us like 5X in hardware costs as we continue to grow.
Edit: I'm told this proprietary database vendor dislikes users publishing benchmark results [onecle.com] comparing their software to F/OSS databases. I'd argue that this is more of an anecdote than a benchmark; but just in case I edited the comment to remove the vendor and product name from the parts that talk about performance.
Disclaimer: As mentioned in a comment below, we tried to tune each the systems to the best of our team's abilities, but aren't really experts in tuning either database system. No doubt each system's results could be improved by people who were deeply available with each databases internals (which I argue is much easier to find for Postgres, since its mailing lists have thousands of people familiar with the internal code).
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Awesome story. I'd wondered about Postgres and heavy-duty jobs; turns out it's as impressive as touted.
I worked 25 years in an Oracle shop, from Oracle 6.1 to Oracle 12c; assumed everything else, certainly FLOSS stuff, had to be toy products by comparison.
Then I tried PostGIS because I was working with the new free GIS program, QGIS, and PostGIS isn't just a free RDBMS, it's a geodatabase. Soon, I found it was handling gigabytes of map data in an eyeblink - on a laptop. The more reading I did on it, the
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I'll preface this by saying that I am not a DB guy. I hate the task and it was one of the first things I hired someone else to do. I don't know how DB admins do their work, I call them wizards.
So, I know some wizards who are otherwise fairly die-hard Linux users (not so much zealots) and even a few wizards that are true OS X aficionados. Of this group, there is a subset that actually prefers Microsoft SQL Server. Me? I find Lotus Notes to be a pain in the ass, fragile, and difficult to configure. (That also
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"I know some wizards who are otherwise fairly die-hard Linux users (not so much zealots) and even a few wizards that are true OS X aficionados. Of this group, there is a subset that actually prefers Microsoft SQL Server."
For it to produce sensible value, you'd need to find someone that could truly say "I'm an expert Microsoft SQL Server DBA, as well as an expert PostgreSQL DBA and I prefer Microsoft to Postgres".
I can say I didn't find such a beast yet.
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...and existing code base. we have thousands of lines of T-SQL code. I have never heard of a business using PostgreSQL. Might be some but I don't know who they are and we deal with tons of customers and vendors with SQL Server and Oracle. Oracle shops use Linux so might be a way to eat into Oracle's market. Still trying to figure out why to put on Linux though. Works fine on Windows and OS license cost is not a big deal compared to SQL CALs.
I just don't see a use case unless Microsoft wants to get out of the server business. Sounds crazy but they might be looking to migrate server and developer products away from windows. They made windows 2012 look like a consumer OS which was strange.
Think about who your customers and vendors are and what percentage of all businesses that really amounts to. I'm guessing not all that much. You don't know of businesses that use postgres because you're working in a different world from where postgres thrives.
Ever browse IMDB?
Use Skype (prior to microsoft's takeover)?
What about instagram?
Used a Mac?
Then you've used postgres.
Skype was in fact a major contributor to postgres development. That's what's nice about an open source product. If you'v
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Some other tricks from SQLserver are obviously the integration services (Extract-Transform-Load) and Analysis
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I don't see how SqlServer can compete against Postgresql. The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with .Net framework.
Focusing on the database server itself is like picking one part out of MS Office and thinking that's it. Integration services, reporting services and analysis services all work together to make SQL Server your one-stop shop for everything. If I was looking for just a database, none of the other bits I'd go with PostgreSQL. I see there's some other various tools but they seem a lot less mature than Microsoft's stuff, I guess it should be possible to use PostgreSQL as a backend via ODBC or OLE DB but it seems
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SQL Server fits in a very neat niche between your MySQLs and your Oracle type servers. It was once explained to me that while SQL Server can't do what Oracle does, it has features that allow it to hit the mid-range for enterprises very well, better than many of the favorite lower end DBs like MySQL, PostgresSQL and now MariaDB. And of course, its integration with Windows Server boxes didn't hurt with adoption either.
And yes, I know that the PostgresDBs of the world can be quite powerful and do heavy lifti
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The only thing SqlServer had going for it was integration with .Net framework.
That's how. .Net framework too, but performance might suffer).
(Note: other databases have integrations with
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Well, the 4.5 ERP system is probably already native on Oracle and has run on Linux for years already.
It's the "cheap crap" software vendors that are likely locking you into Microsoft. Even some of those pretend they can run on Oracle.
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Yes, to some degree, but usually your options are Oracle, or if you are slumming it, they'll let you run on SQL Server.
Oracle is horrendously expensive, so SQL Server often wins because developers want a big name DB that they support in case the customer doesn't want to pay 2 million dollars for a rather small cluster of Oracle hosts, or the customer already has a big Windows Server presence for some reason.
Usually your Postgres or MySQL is an option, but only under the Other SQL... category. They won't co
Re:Postgresql (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, there's a bit of history that I've never shared on Slashdot and it concerns Oracle. As tempting as it is to type that out, I'm really not in the mood for a novella this evening - and you probably aren't in the mood for one either.
The short of it is that I had a salesman in, back in the late 1990s, who wanted to help my company out. By this time, I was already weary (and leery) of such but they had a good idea and a product name that I recognized as being industry-leading. (You can see where this is going, right?) I don't want to mention any names but there's One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison - and I guess he kind of owns the joint.
Now, I don't know what kind of ship (see what I did there?) he runs over there but they have some smooth-talking guys who are actually very well researched. Or, at the time they did. Consider, at the time, this was cutting edge stuff that we were doing and not exactly popular. But these guys knew things about relational databases, joins, parts, searching, indexing, and all these things - and they were happy to give me an education so that I knew all about those things to. And I listened.
It should be noted that I didn't just listen, I asked questions. I didn't just ask them questions - I asked my peers questions. I didn't just ask my peers questions, I asked the people who worked with me questions. I do that, I ask a lot of questions because, contrary to popular opinion, I do not know everything.
So, the short story is that we invited them in. Now, I have shared that part of the story before. It took some time for our DB wizard to return to normal and get over his angry phase but the ship (see what I did there) was righted anew.
Anyhow, they fought, fiddled, exported, and joined, and attached, and merged. They networked and peeked and poked. They were not working with live data, of course. They attempted to get it to communicate with the network and function and do database type things. They spent the better part of six months, as I recall, visiting and testing and poking. They brought in hardware, and boxes, and people. They stomped through and gave promises. Contracts were even signed. More on that in a moment.
And it never worked. Ever. It never came close to working.
Now I don't know if our Wizard sabotaged this. I kind of doubt he did. He wasn't that... Well, no... He was that kind of guy but I don't think he did. I'd have no way of knowing if he did but I suspect he'd have let it slip if he had. It might have been maniacal laughter when they left but that's not what he did. The important part of this is that it never, ever worked.
So, we gave 'em the boot. We had important things to do and they were in the way and slowing us down. We're also working with data that doesn't really belong to us and having to vet an extra ten people stomping in and out of the server room is not acceptable. They leave...
A little while later, in comes a lawsuit. They want an almost 7 figure some of money. Now, I don't know what they were expecting but - if you go back to the earlier part of this message, you'll notice that I ask a lot of questions. The contract that I'd signed, I'd signed it personally, was quite specific in that the job needed to be completed to my satisfaction and that the installation was at their cost. It would appear that they were billing someone (whom I do not know) thousands of dollars a day for that work.
And someone, whom I still do not know, was buying hardware - all that hardware they'd brought in was someone else's expense. I do believe the contract stated we were to pay for hardware, by the way. We didn't keep any of that hardware, use any of that hardware, ask for any of that hardware, sign for any of that hardware, or even really have any room for it - this was pre-expansion.
So, they wanted us to pay for people we did not hire, who did work we could not use. They wanted us to pay for software - and maintenance for some years, that was not installed. They wanted us to pay for hardware we did
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Heh, yeah. I know that *now.* I did not know that *then.* I do wonder how much of it is cultural or outright practice.
As for the TL;DR, there's no real shorter version that has any weight. That is the short version. :/
I could have said, "Fuck you Oracle. Oracle sucks." That might not have the same value. It might... Hopefully, someone sees it and goes into their next vendor meeting armed with the brilliant idea of reading your contracts, asking questions, and not backing down to legal threats. I guess, I pr
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DBA's gotta manage it, and many prefer using a GUI.
Granted, it's often considered better to manage it via scripts (command line text) so that it can be re-created, but in practice, some want "quick and easy". This is MS shops we are talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:2)
They are more than happy to let you spin up a linux instance on Azure. Having their stack work across them all seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I, for one (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:2)
But what I want in Linux is MS Access (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like a joke? No I'm serious.
I don't need yet another database in Linux. PostgreSQL is fine, thank you. Even MySQL/MariaDB are OK.
What I miss is a GUI interface to these databases, which would allow me to quickly build GUI applications for users. MS Access can show PostgreSQL data to users in quickly designed forms and reports. And these can have some (horrible) VBA code to make a few things faster and easier for the users. Without Access, I have to make HTML interfaces, which works fine for simple reports, but gets really clumsy and slow for complex interactive forms.
(Yes, I know about PGadmin. It's great for me, and I use it regularly. But it's not for designing custom user interfaces to databases)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If PostgreSQL is fine for you, you are not the target market for SQL Server, anyway. Before now, customers who needed *real* scalability had only one choice: Oracle.
Re:But what I want in Linux is MS Access (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But what I want in Linux is MS Access (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh god... please end it now. As someone that has had to deal with end user generated 'applications' spreading Access is both a crime against humanity and nature.
"Spreading Access"...yeah, you're right. However, you've missed the essence of what the GP was getting at. Access allows for information to be grouped and displayed easily, without having to write any code, and some minimal code will goes a long way to automation. "Yet Another Centralized Database That Requires An HTML/CSS/JS Frontend To Be Useful" isn't going to stand out nearly as well as something that does what Access does, better than how Access does it.
We'll show them! (Score:5, Funny)
We'll port systemd to Windows!
Thank you Azure (Score:2)
And, it's already in systemd! (Score:2)
SQL Injection (Score:4, Funny)
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they are not bringing sql to linux
No, they're bringing their SQL Server to Linux.
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"SQL Server" is a product name.
Re: crap (Score:2)
MSSQL is a rebrand of Sybase.
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MSSQL is a rebrand of Sybase.
MSSQL was a rebrand of Sybase -- in the early 90s.
Since then it has been completely rewritten. Here is a timeline [wikipedia.org]. SQL Server is a seriously good product. Not just a seriously good product for Microsoft, but a seriously good product. It's SQL for when NOSQL is not enough.
Re: A son returns home (Score:2)
The current SQL Server code-base contain little if any of the code from the first version.
Re: (Score:3)
Your UID is a prime number.
I know, I know... This is off-topic but, damn it, it's important to me!
I even went and found you a link to show it:
http://www.numberempire.com/pr... [numberempire.com]
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Correct. I don't think anyone has made the claim that it is either of those two things. Thanks for stating the obvious, I guess.
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There clearly is no new MS, just an old MS that is getting a bit desperate and finds what some of its customers want increasingly hard to ignore.