Microsoft Is Bringing Its Database Software SQL Server 2016 To Linux

2015 will be remembered as the year when Microsoft open sourced giant piles of code and expressed its love for its arch rival Linux. Under the leadership of Satya Nadella, the “new Microsoft” released the Visual Studio Code for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The company partnered with Red Hat to support Red Hat Linux in Azure and it even developed its own Linux-based OS called Azure Cloud Switch.

The year 2016 isn’t an exception and Microsoft has once again showed its Linux love. As a result, for the first time, Microsoft has announced that it’ll let SQL server run on a platform other than Windows.

In an announcement, Redmond told that its popular database SQL Server is coming to Linux and it’ll be available sometime next year. At the moment, a private preview release with “core relational database capabilities” is available for testing. The SQL Server preview on Linux is available on Ubuntu or as Docker image. In future, the company plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other platforms.

Why is Microsoft bringing SQL Server on Linux?

So, why Redmond is bringing the Linux operating system support to Linux? To answer this question, we could list three main reasons —

1) Microsoft is making tons of money with its heavy bet on the cloud platform Azure. In the past, the company has shifted from its traditional Windows-only image and made cross-platform apps and software. So, moving ahead on the same track, the company hopes to get more revenue from Azure with the help of its SQL Server that runs on Linux.

2) With a Linux-supported version of SQL, Microsoft makes its database software more credible. Lots of companies call Windows-only products untouchable and SQL Server on Linux tackle this problem.

3) Lots of developers want to work on Linux-based databases. In recent times, Microsoft’s SQL Server has lost market share to open source databases and the company wants to solve this problem with the latest iteration.

The best new features in SQL Server 2016:

These are some of the best additions in SQL Server 2016: Better security encryption capabilities, in memory database support for every workload, Business Intelligence for every employee, advanced analytics using new R support, cloud capabilities for deploying hybrid architectures etc.

With this step, Microsoft aims to make SQL Server available to a broader set of users and meeting their demands. You can read more about this announcement at Microsoft’s blog.

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