A behind-the-scenes look at launching SQL Server on Linux

Last November, Microsoft announced the next release of the public preview of SQL Server on Linux and Windows. With that release, users could develop applications with SQL Server on Linux, Windows, Docker, or macOS (via Docker) and then deploy to Linux, Windows, or Docker, on-premises or in the cloud.

In the two weeks following the release, there were more than 21,000 downloads of the preview and the team has been very pleased to see the positive reaction from customers and the community.

However, getting SQL Server to run on Linux was no small task. To make SQL Server support multiple platforms, the engineering task is essentially to remove or abstract away its dependencies on Windows. “As you can imagine, after decades of development against a single operating system, there are plenty of OS-specific dependencies across the code base. In addition, the code base is huge. There are tens of millions of lines of code in SQL Server,” wrote the SQL Server Team on their blog.

For a “behind the scenes” look at how the team and its community made all of this happen, check out the below two-part video series. [Note: You can watch the videos full-screen on the Channel 9 Data Exposed blog.]

SQL Server on Linux: The HOW (Part 1 of 2)

SQL Server on Linux: The HOW (Part 2 of 2)

Also, the SQL Server team has pulled together many resources, developer tutorials, and tools to make it easy to get started – check out the SQL Server Blog for more details today. Let us know what you think in the comments.