Another note on versions used in this blog

Hello readers! Last year I made a post about the SQL Server versions I use for this blog, and it's time to post an update.

I'm a Mac user, so I've historically had to run SQL Server in a Windows virtual machine. Thanks to Microsoft's expansion into the Linux world, this has opened up my options quite a bit! As time has passed, I've largely stopped using SQL Server on Windows for my lab environment, focusing instead on the Linux version. I'm currently using SQL Server 2019 CU2 on Ubuntu 18.04.4 Server LTS running in a Parallels Desktop hypervisor (VirtualBox is a great free alternative, and runs on a wide variety of platforms). I also use Docker containers for ephemeral instances. I use Azure Data Studio and Visual Studio Code to do my management and dev stuff.

As such, please assume unless stated otherwise that everything in this blog is based on SQL Server 2019 for Linux, on whatever CU is current at the time of publication (though it might be the previous CU if a new one has been released just before I publish). Screenshots are going to generally be from Azure Data Studio. Once in a while I'll do something in SSMS or on a Windows-based instance, but I to call those out specifically.

Please note that SQL Server is officially supported on Ubuntu 16.04, though. I tried to get it running on 18 as a lark (it started life as a SQL Server 2017 instance, upgraded in place to 2019, and while it's doable, there are some hoops to jump through), but I don't do any production work here.

You've got lots of options these days for running SQL Server on non-Windows platforms! Soon I'll be learning Azure SQL Database, so that'll be another new frontier!