News Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

I don't know how I feel about this, other than stunned that they actually did it.

 

Maybe Microsoft are seeing less value in their operating systems and more value in their other software products.

The move to linux makes sense given that oracle database runs on Linux and linux has a massive server install base.

This is probably why they open sourced .net (at least I think they did)

 

To my knowledge, MS created their own SQL for the same reason they made their own Java - to intentionally cripple the competition. Since MS's SQL is relatively unpopular, they probably realized that they lost this petty battle and decided to stop fighting it, without giving up support.

 

I don't think MS SQL is relatively "unpopular".

 

It's Nadella's paradigm actually, value their software products, they want a chunk out of oracle, and honestly, this could finally prove a good competition for oracle.

 

I suppose you're right. I must be thinking of an earlier year, though, the current popularity of it is going down.

 

WHAT?! ..I... w.... why? :O

 

You're likely only thinking about what you see on public internet-facing systems where there's a lot of open-source DBMS in use, but there is a massive amount of large scale MS SQL in private enterprise environments that nobody outside them knows about.

The Gartner report from Q4 2015 puts MS ahead of Oracle and AWS.

Putting MS SQL on Linux makes absolute sense, it's a licensed product so any OS they can get it on makes them money. In this case they are gunning squarely for Oracle.

 

Can we get Phil to try it out?

 

^^ This +1

Nadella's long-term aim is to make Microsoft's non-Windows products much more platform agnostic - a SQL Server licence is still a SQL Server licence regardless of whether you run it on a Windows server or a Linux server. Perhaps we'll start to see other server products on Linux - Exchange on Linux, anyone?

 

I wonder if in the long term Microsoft will end up discontinuing Windows Server, while migrating most services to Linux and/or simply offering them as add-ons for regular, desktop Windows.

 

No I don't think so there's still a market for Windows Server. I think they're just trying to monetise markets where Linux is king.

 

Simple: announce a product, perhaps even release a version or two, then kill it. This takes attention away from the competition and sways some unsuspecting suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers over to Microsoft-s side. Once the transition is made it is expensive to get back so they stay locked with a poor alternative that Microsoft comes up with as a replacement for the real thing ("<insert product type here> as a service").

 

Disclosure: I am a SQL Server developer. I'm by no means an evangelist; I happened to end up working with SQL server by chance rather than by design, but I do get paid to work with it.

Microsoft are leveraging the fact that Linux-based systems are getting more and more popular with the growth of "cloud" platforms. Even Azure supports Linux-based systems now. It makes perfect sense for them: "No matter where or how your run your database, we've got a product that can run on your platform". The enterprise is where Microsoft makes their *real* money, always has been.

As for SQL Server being unpopular.... LOL (or any other hyperbolic text- or image-based representation of laughing uncontrollably). In the enterprise world there are basically two database servers: SQL Server and Oracle. There are others out there of course (SAP HANA being a notable example), but the market for SQL Server and Oracle is huge. It's not getting any smaller for a while.

I'm sure they're in a hurry to drop SQL Server, it's not like the first version was released in 1989 or anything. And it's not like they will have been supporting SQL Server 2005 for 10 years, and SQL Server 2008 for 11 years. Clearly they're only interested in screwing their enterprise database customers for a quick buck.

These things are sometimes lost in text so let me be explicit: that was sarcasm. SQL Server is a 27-year old product; there have been at least 10 major versions so far with numerous service packs, refreshes, additions, etc.

 

I've only seen SQL Server in industry, partly because of where I worked but other people's systems used SQL Server as well. There's a big market for that internal non-wan facing stuff. Oracle seemed to only rear its head in terms of larger corporate level databases which I was never involved with or would have seen.

 

I was thinking something similar!