I must admit I was surprised when I learned that Microsoft SQL Server would be availble in Linux. They’ve been pushing the open source initiative hard, but I didn’t expect something this big. Oh yeah, Visual Studio is now available for Mac as well. I just saw a pig flying by.

While MS-SQL is not open source they have made it available to run on open source platforms such as Linux and OSX, which I can imagine took a ton of work. So I decided to take advantage of this new option and try it out. It works great! It took 5 minutes to install. Here’s how you can do it too. Note that you will need a server with 3.5 gigs of RAM for this.

The first thing I always do on an Ubuntu machine is update it

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Next we need to import the public repository GPG keys

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curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mssql-server.list

Next we’ll install SQL Server.

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sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server

Now we need to run a configuration script to set up the server:

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sudo /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr-setup

` It will ask if you want to start the service and if you’d like to start it on boot.

Here’s how you can check if the service is running:

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systemctl status mssql-server

Install the MSSQL Tools for Linux

To test this out a little, install the MSSQL tools on Ubuntu.

Add in a new repository:

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curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/msprod.list

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install mssql-tools

Now, Let’s try to connect!

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sqlcmd -S localhost -U SA -P '<YourPassword>'

You can run this command to view all your databases:

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SELECT Name from sys.Databases;
GO

This should look pretty familiar to you if you’ve worked with SQL in the past.

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CREATE DATABASE acmewidgets;
GO

Now we need to select that database:

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USE acmewidgets;
GO

As a test. let’s create a customer table

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CREATE TABLE customer (id INT, firstname NVARCHAR(50), lastname NVARCHAR(50));
GO

Now, let’s put some customers in there:

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INSERT INTO customer VALUES (1, 'Lloyd', 'Christmas');
INSERT INTO customer VALUES (2, 'Harry', 'Dunn');
INSERT INTO customer VALUES (3, 'Mary', 'Swanson');
GO

Now, let’s take a look at those customers:

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SELECT * FROM customer
GO

And it’s that easy! You can run SQL scripts here, or connect to it from SSMS, a traditional ASP site, or a .Net Core site/app. I’ll be doing a lot of ASP.Net core work in the coming months, so be sure to check back here.

To quit from SQL server, type in

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QUIT

And you’re done!

I’ll be messing with this some more in the coming weeks and really putting it to the test, and I’ll share my results.

-Jeremy

I also did a YouTube tutorial for this article:

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