In recent years, Microsoft has been expanding its portfolio of offerings that are either compatible with or ported to the Linux operating system. With its SQL Server 2017 release, Microsoft delivered SQL Server on Linux and Docker containers. In this white paper, we review the newly released SQL Server 2019 with Big Data Cluster on Docker containers.

Microsoft is developing SQL Server implementations of Linux containers for Linux and Windows hosts and for Windows containers for Windows. The supported features and road maps for these implementations vary, so carefully verify whether a product meets your requirements. For this white paper, we worked exclusively with SQL Server containers for Linux.

Microsoft first introduced support for the Linux operating system and containerized Linux images in SQL Server 2017. According to Microsoft, one of the primary use cases for customers who are adopting SQL Server containers is for local dev/test in DevOps pipelines, with deployment handled by Kubernetes. SQL Server in containers offers many advantages for DevOps because of its consistent, isolated, and reliable behavior across environments, ease of use, and ease of starting and stopping. Applications can be built on top of SQL Server containers and run without being affected by the rest of the environment. This isolation makes SQL Server in containers ideal for test deployment scenarios and DevOps processes.