When I first began my career, I became a Linux junkie. Slackware was my distro of choice. As the years went on, I shifted my career into SQL Server, leaving my needs for Linux behind.
Last night, I installed Ubuntu on a VMWare VM, followed by SQL Server vNext.
Microsoft’s Steve Balmer infamously labelled Linux a cancer. Today’s Microsoft embraces it. As a technologist, I am thrilled to pieces.
Fanboy gushing aside, I spent more time with things today and thought I’d just write a quick blog about things I learned/gotchas. What follows is some randomness that I encountered today.
My VM lab on my laptop is setup with static IP addresses. This meant I had to teach myself how to make network changes in Ubuntu, vs what I remembered from Slackware. Just amounted to making appropriate changes in /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/hosts, and /etc/hostname. Once that was squared away, I was able to stop using the direct interface and fire up PuTTY.
Oh yeah, I had to install sshd too. Man, Ubuntu makes this stuff easy compared to what I remember! ‘sudo apt get sshd’ and I was done! Man you kids have it easy these days! 😉
Silly me struggled with getting SSMS 2016 to connect happily to vNext CTP1… until I discovered that I needed to grab a different SSMS RC1 release! Doh! Installed that side-by-side without issue and boom, I was in!
Next interesting challenge was enabling VMWare Workstation shared folders, so I could easily pull over my demo database backup files. To accomplish this, I had to mount /dev/cdrom, copy over the VMware Tools GZ file, extract it, then I could install everything. Once that was done, /mnt/hgfs/ had my VM shared folder, so I was able to easily pull over and restore my EveryByteCounts & AutoDealershipDemo databases!
I cracked open the solution files from my three presentations and ran through all of my demo scripts. All worked as expected, even the DBCC PAGE & other internals related scripts (as they should). I may do my next SQL Server presentation using my Linux VM, just because I can… and not tell my audience until the end, and see if that blows their minds! 🙂
At some point, I am going to throw all of this out & create a fresh Ubuntu VM without SQL Server installed, so I can use that as a linked clone. Hopefully that’ll make spinning up and installing new CTPs easier to manage. I am also curious to experiment with SQL Server installation options and explore the configuration files. I only followed the basic instructions which installed everything.
I’m pleasantly surprised how fun I am having, tinkering with SQL Server on Linux. This is genuinely exciting to me, since it takes me back to my Linux roots. Look forward to what comes next!
Every Byte Counts 