LWN: Comments on "Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux"

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

davidgerard — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 20:52:19 +0000

$DAYJOB recently moved all our internal Oracle to Postgres and EVERYTHING IS JUST RIDICULOUSLY BETTER NOW. Not just because we never need to think about licensing ever again, but because we can just give every app its own PG clustered pair and nothing has to play nice with anything else.

We also have some SQL Server for a .NET app we bought in. Now looking at moving that to PG as well ...

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

xkahn — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 20:19:27 +0000

There is a pretty good FLOSS Sharepoint alternative: Alfresco.

I've never used Sharepoint, so I don't know how equivalent they really are, but you can check it out yourself: https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Main_Page

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Wol — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 13:37:23 +0000

Only thing is - were there any contractual requirements in place? Seeing as MS SQL-Server was a rebadged Sybase, would there have been non-competes in place saying that they couldn't tread on each other's territory?

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Wol — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 13:34:28 +0000

Get it fixed?

That's the nice thing about linux. Unless there's a design fault (and unfortunately, it seems to me that parts of Posix at least ARE design faults), if it's a problem/bug, anyone with the will can get it fixed.

Unfortunately, reading between the lines from previous threads, I get the impression that *fast* *efficient* flushing to disk for a database is the victim of just such as design fault.

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

paulj — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 09:00:26 +0000

WebRTP has allowed in-the-browser audio & video-conferencing to make great strides forward. See https://meet.jit.si/ for a Free option. Commercial ones like BlueJeans have slide sharing features I think.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

xnox — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 02:43:32 +0000

Will it ship on Steam for Linux, with Wine dlls?! =) Also, nice to see a bunch of people coming out as exchange/lync/etc users. Seems like people still have a pulse on things. Honestly, I think Facebook At Work is better than Exchange/Lync/Office365 combos. But I'm yet to use it. Google Apps are quite good but had a few fiascos along the way - (chat, wave, buzz, plus, hangouts, and the "exchange" connector woes)

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

rossmohax — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 23:17:22 +0000

Can't wait to see how they are going to workaround broken async disk IO in Linux kernel.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

cyperpunks — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 19:23:32 +0000

MySQL is available and supported for Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris (x86 and sparc) and various Linux distros:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

avtechmjc — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 13:18:10 +0000

Thanks, I'll have to revisit kexi and see how it has matured.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

epa — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 11:21:43 +0000

Originally Microsoft SQL Server was a Windows port of Sybase SQL Server. Microsoft sold it for Windows while Sybase took the Unix side. So it being Windows-only makes some sense. As another poster noted, this could also be why porting it back to a Unix-like system has been relatively quick.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

halla — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:38:10 +0000

Kexi should provide all of that: http://www.kexi-project.org/.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

osma — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:10:50 +0000

At least it's available as a cloud service: https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

mads — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:08:46 +0000

I read your comment too fast, I see you mentioned it already.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

mads — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:07:48 +0000

Isn't LibreOffice Base meant to be a contender for MS Access functionality?

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

anselm — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 08:24:45 +0000

I recently heard a presentation about “ToroDB”, which is a MongoDB-compatible server on top of PostgreSQL. It gives you the same sort of schema-free “non-SQL” database that MongoDB does, and apparently for many if not most applications it runs rings around the original MongoDB, performance-wise.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

pr1268 — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 07:13:23 +0000

I dunno... My experience is that Oracle is equally hated by both the MS fanboys and Linux/FLOSS camps.

Side note: I find it interesting that while the FLOSS varieties of DMBSes (e.g. MariaDB/MySQL, Postgres, etc.) work on Windows, Solaris, and BSD¹ (and have done so for years), so does Oracle, but only but now does MS SQLServer work on something *other* than Windows Server...

As usual, Microsoft is late to the game. Oh well, better late than never.

¹ Also, Postgres, Oracle, and MariaDB all run on Mac OS X.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Cyberax — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 02:18:15 +0000

I've yet to see people using _Lync_ for VoIP. Skype is indeed quite good at it. And it's only a matter of time until Slack adds good video conferencing: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/7917857/slack-buys-scre...

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

raven667 — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 02:01:39 +0000

>competitors (like HipChat or Slack)

Those are mainly IM systems, Skype for Business is a VoIP phone system with E911 as well as chat, screen and file sharing, integration with O365 for voicemail storage. Not really in the same class as just a chat system

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

rahvin — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:23:41 +0000

Whether people like exchange or not, it's functionality has more than 15 years of business cooperation behind it's features. Microsoft did one thing very well for a very long time and that was to work with enterprise customers to satisfy feature requests. People complain about all the things office can do that most people don't use but those features come from extensive feedback and customization requests by enterprise customers. Exchange is the same game, it may do a lot of stuff badly but it's combined features are often significantly ahead of anyone else. And there are a lot of those features that are killer features for a lot of businesses.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

drag — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 23:46:29 +0000

Is /dev/null webscale?

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Cyberax — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 22:05:15 +0000

> Nice to bring up that Lync doesn't work nicely on Mac OS X. To add: it also doesn't work on *BSD, nor Linux (if you ignore Android).
Correct.

It should be noted that its competitors (like HipChat or Slack) don't have this problem.

> It also isn't free software, tied into Active Directory, hosting it is apparently terrible, etc.
That's not really a problem for its users.

> Have you seen 20.000+ people interacting using Lync (+all the rest it needs and integrates with).
Unfortunately, yes. They're now switching to Biba.

> I haven't checked every suggested alternative, but a lot of the alternatives are quite inefficient or limited feature wise.
Not anymore.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

raven667 — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:49:13 +0000

The Mac client is admittedly pretty crappy but they are scrapping it and rewriting it right now, based on the Skype codebase, and should have the new one shipping by the end of this year, I've seen it although I'm not in the beta test group. I think people have been much happier with the Skype-based client than the old OCS based client.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

ovitters — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:46:53 +0000

> You have a low bar for excellence...

You have a impressive ability to dismiss what I said!

Nice to bring up that Lync doesn't work nicely on Mac OS X. To add: it also doesn't work on *BSD, nor Linux (if you ignore Android). It also isn't free software, tied into Active Directory, hosting it is apparently terrible, etc.

Ok, for you it is horrible because you're using Mac OS X. However, that doesn't change its featureset nor what Lync is able to do. Summarizing that I have a low bar is laughable. Have you seen 20.000+ people interacting using Lync (+all the rest it needs and integrates with). I haven't checked every suggested alternative, but a lot of the alternatives are quite inefficient or limited feature wise. While Lync integrates every time of communication as well as meetings, etc.

In my other comment I already addressed that vendor lock in is bad, I'm not advocating people should use it, etc. Further, loads of businesses take a different approach. As said I use this solely at work.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

raven667 — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:45:31 +0000

It's nice to see them de-couple their server software from their Windows OS, most every other DB software is multi-platform, and it's strictly more revenue from the MS perspective, Windows licensing is a tenth of the cost of SQL so a small increase of SQL sales can make up for a lot of missing Windows OS revenue. Honestly the SQL server business needs the Windows OS business a lot less than the other way around, let each stand on its own. This is what should have happened more than a decade ago if the antitrust enforcement had been upheld rather than failing when the White House changed hands.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Cyberax — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:00:36 +0000

> As a user, Lync/Skype is awesome. Easily share screen, share files, calling, see accurate status of other people.
You have a low bar for excellence...

Lync has no such basic features as reconnection on Mac OS X, it's not usable on iOS, no support for browser-only version, no server-side history, extremely poor group chats, screen sharing barely works on Mac, it constantly crashes and so on.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

reedstrm — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:33:05 +0000

Reading that technote, it sounds essentially identical in practice to the existing single master replication available in pg core. Note the recommendation of doing all writes on one node, for performance reasons.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

cortana — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:23:18 +0000

Ugh. They stole my name, I swear!

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

smckay — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 17:35:21 +0000

I think that in some ways SQL Server is much easier to port than MS's desktop products. It doesn't rely heavily on Windows-specific stuff at a low level, e.g. you connect with TCP not DCOM. It doesn't have a significant GUI component. Its long-ago ancestor, Sybase SQL Server, was developed for Unix.

I'm sure it's still a huge undertaking, but it seems reasonable that MS could port SQL Server without having to rewrite it or port most of the Windows API along with it. My not-super-informed guess is that we'll see an initial release (maybe CTP) with basic stuff, and a later release including the features that take more work to port or are less widely used, like CLR sprocs. And some things just won't be ported because they can't be, like DTC integration.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

cread — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:55:50 +0000

MongoDB is only suitable if you don't care about data consistency: https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

ThinkRob — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:51:50 +0000

> MongoDB is a web scale database, and doesn't use SQL or JOINs, so it's high-performance.

This is a reference to this, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

I hope it is...

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

ovitters — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:47:44 +0000

> Not that I've ever phrased any criticism in quite the same form as your final sentence, however.

I didn't mean anything in a negative/accusing way. The last sentence was actually not directed at you, it was a further explanation of why I wrote the original post (hoping to provide insight). I am quite annoyed that I like this proprietary solution; I'd really wish for something based on open standards, free software and as little vendor lock in as possible. If there is/was any negative tone, it is not directed at you.

Initially I also had a bit explaining about the cost. A one off fee is just that. But then the reliability comes into play and how much it would cost when it is down. Is the risk acceptable, etc. Within free software the assumption usually is that the cost should be low because anyone might be able to copy your work. While if you have big customers as a client, the cost calculation works quite a bit different (except if you're considered a commodity). I noticed that one of the KDE people at FOSDEM having a stand with a company (IIRC) related to communication. I think there's quite a bit of money to be made here. Even if the software plus support costs quite a bit per user; a company is able to save so much that this should be pretty profitable.

Firebird

xose — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:36:38 +0000

or Firebird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_%28database_server%29

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

busman — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:35:57 +0000

I wonder when they decided to do it... I imagine it takes a little longer than the mythical man month to port MS SQL Server to run on Linux. But not 10 years :) Filesystem optimatizations, memory handling, ... It would be interesting to know how much man hours it took/still is going to take. Could help assessing whether it's feasible to port other applications by them or by other companies.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

jra — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:33:19 +0000

Samba AD DC can replace Microsoft AD DC in some situations currently (I know of several large orgs using it right now :-). Best thing is to evaluate to see if it'll fit what you want. Plus we keep working on making it better... (and working on replacing the home-grown components with standard OpenLDAP and MIT krb5 will help make things a lot better - watch for these developments ! :-).

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

pboddie — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 16:26:50 +0000

I didn't talk about videoconferencing? Actually that's the one thing that wasn't activated, nor anything I see used often.

OK, but that wasn't clear to me from your comment. I have heard people rambling about Lync and Skype before, but I have no inclination to track the latest technology branding. As I understand your explanation, what you're describing is the kind of unified communications platform that the big telecoms equipment vendors were all lining up to pitch around fifteen years ago, a little while before they all went under, got bought and/or were merged into a big patent portfolio looking for litigation opportunities (thinking of Nortel, Alcatel, Lucent, Nokia's and Siemens' networks divisions and the like). The big difference being exactly how that vision was meant to be realised.

Regarding your "email is easier": Not always! Sometimes calling resolves things way quicker. In that case, it _is_ super efficient to see that they're at their desk, plus being able to call in 3 sec max. Going back and forth via email takes time and might continue for days (easy when you have timezone differences).

E-mail was going to be easier in the situation I described, but just as people blame e-mail for some kind of tyranny over their working day, various "presence-based" tools are probably even worse. Then again, given the enthusiasm for "agile" nowadays, which everyone has taken to mean locking everyone up in the same open-plan office and driving them hard, exchanging 3 second phone calls is probably a delight for some audiences.

You'll not convince the world with just a "but it is free software and open standards"!

Somehow, I think I realise that. After all, the world is quite happy to ignore vendor lock-in and what should be known as "data smuggling" because they happen to like the sales pitch, so I quite understand that you also have to give people something nice and shiny, too.

I'm not advocating to use Lync/proprietary solutions, I want either a free software solution which can at least comes close to what I'm used to, or that people have an understanding of how far off free software is in this regard. If you included me in your "brushing away group", then you've completely missed of what my post was about. Understand how I work with Lync, and make something better (as free software).

And still I suppose people like me deserve all the "entitlement" jibes we get when we offer honest and constructive criticism of the various desktop projects. Not that I've ever phrased any criticism in quite the same form as your final sentence, however.

Indeed, I do write software to attempt to address the shortcomings of Free Software offerings - not in "presence" or real-time communications or whichever buzzword I failed to mention, however - for all the good it does me, given that the apparent attitude amongst any projects significantly well-resourced to offer sustainable alternatives seem to be hell-bent in knocking the king from his throne only to wear his crown. (And just take a look at the distributed social networking scene to see what the prevailing attitudes manage to achieve when such projects are not significantly well-resourced.)

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

sorpigal — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:54:44 +0000

Sharepoint is 99% nonsense. Any web CMS replaces the parts of it that are useful and there are plenty of those. The things no F/OSS alternative can ever replace are the delusions that MS sales reps have put into the heads of management about what sharepoint is for and what value it brings.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

linuxrocks123 — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:42:11 +0000

MongoDB is a web scale database, and doesn't use SQL or JOINs, so it's high-performance.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

epa — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:37:25 +0000

It's really one of the few products that MS does very well, the other ones being ActiveDirectory and Exchange.

What these have in common is that they were all developed outside Microsoft.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

epa — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:35:45 +0000

MSSQL has advanced a fair bit since it forked from Sybase, and now has multi-version concurrency control (snapshot isolation) as Postgres and Oracle do.

Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

ovitters — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:26:32 +0000

I didn't talk about videoconferencing? Actually that's the one thing that wasn't activated, nor anything I see used often.

When I say calling, I mean that either my (Voip) phone starts calling that person or the Lync call itself. With screen sharing, I mean sharing the things on your screen. E.g. say you're working on something and your colleague is a continent away. I'll check his status, ask if he can has some time and share screen, etc. This works really well, even in groups and with low bandwidth links. It takes no time to setup. It is so easy that it is used for everything. Another example is e.g. a meeting with various people? The "host" shares their screen and write down minutes. All visible to all. If needed to discuss something else, the host switches to that.

There's various other solutions that could be done. But none work as nicely as this. Keep in mind that I've only covered the basics.

> I think it all might be a bit overrated, "international business" or not.

If you're imagining/assuming all kinds of inefficiencies you'll never grasp what I'm explaining! Various people do work inefficiently yeah, but that's not the topic.

I said international business with a reason; that sometimes you don't know the timezone someone is in, nor when they get to the office or leave the office. When I want to call someone, it is handy I can see if I have a reliable way to see that they're available (without needing to ask) plus a very quick way to call them (without needing to know their phone number). Something such as "last seen" is nowhere near good enough.

Regarding your "email is easier": Not always! Sometimes calling resolves things way quicker. In that case, it _is_ super efficient to see that they're at their desk, plus being able to call in 3 sec max. Going back and forth via email takes time and might continue for days (easy when you have timezone differences).

Now regarding personal life, yeah, I highly prefer Free Software and use it almost exclusively. But to have a great free software solution, you'll also need to understand what considerations other people make. I said in my original comment "as a user", because 1) apparently Exchange and Lync are horrible to administrate 2) I use it because I get paid. Fortunately I don't have to care about #1.

I'd like more people to have an understanding in what some (proprietary) software makes possible. You'll not convince the world with just a "but it is free software and open standards"! I'm not advocating to use Lync/proprietary solutions, I want either a free software solution which can at least comes close to what I'm used to, or that people have an understanding of how far off free software is in this regard. If you included me in your "brushing away group", then you've completely missed of what my post was about. Understand how I work with Lync, and make something better (as free software).