SQL Server beta for Windows Server Containers terminated 'with immediate effect' Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect." The statement yesterday (early on a US public holiday) by Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal said: "Due to the existing ecosystem challenges and usage patterns we have decided to suspend the SQL Server on Windows Containers …
But the google capatcha/ tingamagig is not working (at least via my net connection)
re: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/06/microsoft_cancels_sql_server_beta_windows_server_containers/
even though Microsoft's relational database is designed to run on Windows and the Linux version uses a Platform Abstraction Layer (SQLPAL) which maps Windows calls to Linus OS calls, as explained in this paper.
Calls to “Linus OS” ??
Autocorrect issue ? :-)
Let's get real : companies do not have the budget to create entire test environments just to approve the latest Borkzilla brainfart.
You put out a tool that can be useful and companies are going to find a production use for it. Then, once they've adapted their business processes, they're going to rely on it.
You can go on claiming beta status all you want, terminating with immediate effect is the ultimate dick move. You lured them in, and once they were hooked, you cut them off without warning.
Honestly people, when will you learn ? Borkzilla publishes a new tool ? Great. Come back in five years and see whether it's still there or not. Then start building stuff with it.
SQL Server certifications for SQL Server have gone, if you want a database certification form Microsoft, it will have to be one of the Azure ones.
Look at how much information Microsoft is giving about the next version of SQL Server. I assume that there will be one. Normally, Microsoft release a new version of SQL Server every 18-24 months.
Look at all of the marketing coming out of Microsoft: *everything* is about Azure. It is almost as if Microsoft will punish anyone publicly mentioning SQL Server.
And if you want to learn Azure, you will have to pay, because Azure is a service to be rented.
Sure, the first hit is free:
-- from the PDF 'The Developer's Guide to Azure' [1]
You don’t need to do much—just sign up for an Azure free account. This includes 12 months of free services, including $200 in credits for 30 days, enabling you to explore paid Azure services, and over 25 services that you can use for free ad infinitum.
But after that, it costs and you have to pay to learn. Microsoft wins both ways.
Now, don't get me wrong, Azure *is* great and it allows one to do a lot of things that on-premises make hard. If you need a server with 64 cores and 512GB RAM for a project, it's available and much, cheaper than buying the hardware for on-premises. The AI and IoT services look particularly good too.
But, it is not the be-all-and-end-all of databases in Microsoftland.
And, AWS is super for cloud-based servers and short projects with massive resource requirments too.
And Microsoft is actively discouraging SQL Server on-premises as well as online. I wonder how long SQL Server as we know has to live? One more version maybe?
I expect that I, and the company I work for, will have to make hard decisions in the coming years. If we want to stay on-premises, when do we need to start getting the DBAs & developers up to scratch on PostgreSQL, or do we take the less hard road and surrender our security, freedom & data to the Microsoft Cloud.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/developer-guide/?cdn=disable
Subscriptions to The Cloud for Everything are the poison of the future.
You have been recast as a renter. You own nothing. Your IP is now buried so deep in SharePoint (and crap like Teams...which is really SharePoint), you'll never get it out of its new sewer.
Micro$haft's goal is to drive customers to The Cloud while destroying their villages, making any return unlikely.
Corporations are such shortsighted suckers, ripe for the plucking.
Yes, SQL Server did hit an on-premise peak with the Availability Groups. A really good and straightforward way of implementing shared nothing DB clusters. An actual reason for using it for resilient DBs, which leads to standardised shops using it for other things too.
Now we look to see if Postgres will do the job we need, and very often it will. I'm not going to be looking at using Azure just to get SQL Server, I'd sooner start the process of moving away from it. Just like we did quite happily with Oracle before when we needed to escape a voracious leech.
Postgres, either with extensions or in the form of Enterprise DB seems to tick all the boxes without all those licence problems. If it's a business DB, paying some kind of fee is fine but SQL Server seems to be about the additional Windows licences you need and all that extra RAM.
All that extra RAM is actually a good thing, that’s your buffer cache and ideally it would be big enough to contain your entire database, but at least all the extents that get used frequently. That RAM could give you more performance than your cpu cores and hence licenses. The additional SQL seats though, or the core licensing model is now starting to feel less value for money than it used to.
I think many of us would argue that SQLServer Licensing and Value For Money was always an oxymoron.
Many corporates are taking the easy way out and L&S SQLServer into the Cloud. The problem here is the 'easy way out' is an 'expensive way in'
SQL Server's general licensing terms are a pain even on Windows, I've got several instances I'd love to replace with Postgres just to reduce the hardware demands. But, as they're "embedded" databases, I'm entirely dependent upon the developers learning to work with a DB they can't just click together.
ahhh, the SQL Server docker image. Yes, it does work. Which saves a lot of hassle when you're executing automated tests under Linux CI. But said image is also a memory hog, takes ages to start and is generally considered a lesser evil that avoids having to set up a Windows machine instance just for running a test.
Until you move away from SQL Server, that is.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
