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Back in 2016, when Microsoft announced<\/a> that SQL Server would soon run on Linux, the news came as a major\u00a0surprise<\/a> to users and pundits alike. Over the course of the last year, Microsoft\u2019s support for Linux (and open source in general), has come into clearer focus and the company\u2019s mission now seems to be all about bringing its tools to wherever its users are.<\/p>\n The company today launched the first release candidate of SQL Server 2017<\/a>, which will be the first version to run on Windows, Linux and in Docker containers. The Docker container<\/a> alone has already seen more than 1 million pulls, so there can be no doubt that there is a lot of interest in this new version. And while there are plenty of new features and speed improvements in this new version, the fact that SQL Server 2017 supports Linux remains one of the most interesting aspects of this release.<\/p>\n Ahead of today\u2019s announcement, I talked to Rohan Kumar<\/a>, the general manager of Microsoft\u2019s Database Systems group, to get a bit more info about the history of this project and how his team managed to bring an extremely complex piece of software like SQL Server to Linux. Kumar, who has been at Microsoft for more than 18 years, noted that his team noticed many enterprises were starting to use SQL Server for their mission-critical workloads. But at the same time, they were also working in mixed environments that included both Windows Server and Linux. For many of these businesses, not being able to run their database of choice on Linux became a friction point.<\/p>\n \u201cTalking to enterprises, it became clear that doing this was necessary,\u201d Kumar said. \u201cWe were forcing customers to use Windows as their platform of choice.\u201d In another incarnation of Microsoft, that probably would\u2019ve been seen as something positive, but the company\u2019s strategy today is quite different.<\/p>\n Kumar also noted that many enterprises were looking for an alternative to Oracle\u2019s database products. If you want to run Linux and use a proprietary relational database with full enterprise support, you aren\u2019t exactly spoiled for choice, after all.<\/p>\n As Kumar told me, this wasn\u2019t the first time his team looked at Linux support. \u201cWe had a couple of discussions in the past where it wasn\u2019t approved,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t something considered to be a strategic way for the business.\u201d But three years ago \u2014 now with Satya Nadella at the top of the company \u2014 the team decided to pitch this idea again.\u201dThe biggest surprising part was that we were expecting\u00a0a whole lot of back and forth. It was really surprising to see how quickly the decisions got made,\u201d Kumar said.<\/p>\n With the decision made, the team faced a daunting task, though: how do you port the tens of millions of lines of SQL Server\u2019s code to Linux? Kumar didn\u2019t want to make any compromise in functionality either, so it either had to be the full core of SQL Server or nothing at all (and for now, that excludes the graphical user interfaces and tools the company offers on Windows).<\/p>\n About two years ago, the SQL Server team decided to make this the core of its Linux efforts. \u201cThe leadership expressed the right amount of concern,\u201d Kumar commented \u2014 and my guess is that there was indeed quite a bit of concern given that Drawbridge was very much an experimental project. But the SQL Server team took over the Drawbridge code base and added it into the SQL OS layer.<\/p>\n This OS layer was, in many ways, what made this project possible. Because SQL Server\u2019s needs always went beyond what Windows and Windows Server were able to offer, especially with regard to memory management, the team had already built many of the standard OS features into SQL Server\u2019s OS layer<\/a> already. Thanks to this, SQL Server in Drawbridge could manage its own memory, too, for example. The work on this was successful enough that the team didn\u2019t just build this for SQL Server on Linux but actually merged SQL OS and the work it did on Drawbridge into the new SQL Platform Abstraction Layer<\/a> that now runs on Windows and Linux.<\/p>\n As a result, the SQL Server team can work from a single code base and doesn\u2019t really have to worry about where the code will run (and this includes Microsoft\u2019s Azure platform).<\/p>\n SQL Server for Linux should reach general availability later this year. Even today, a couple of companies are already using it in production, and the Linux version now runs as fast as the Windows version (assuming comparable hardware).<\/p>\n Looking beyond the final release, Kumar noted that the team would take a close look at what to do next. While innovation in the database space continues to accelerate, not all of Microsoft\u2019s customers want annual (or even faster) updates for their mission-critical systems. Given that we\u2019ve lately seen annual SQL Server releases with SQL Server 2016 and 2017, though, I\u2019d be surprised if we didn\u2019t hear about the first SQL Server 2018 preview releases sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: David Papazian\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/bjU-tRr4DiQ\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in 2016, when Microsoft announced that SQL Server would soon run on Linux, the news came as a major\u00a0surprise to users and pundits alike. Over the course of the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-7442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/b2630_04_thumb.png?resize=390%2C595&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Sitting over a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese restaurant in Redmond, the team found its answer: Drawbridge<\/a>. Drawbridge was a research project that launched back in 2011 which basically provided a container with a small API surface and a basic version of Windows configured to efficiently run the application in the container. The idea here was basically to build better and more secure virtual machines. The library OS then executes the application, handles memory management and other vital functions, and integrates with the underlying operating system.<\/p>\n