4 ms·

>> The first order engineering of making that happen, assuming you disable some Windows-specific functionality, was rather small (on the order of a few manweeks

by lrobb 15y ago

>> The first order engineering of making that happen, assuming you disable some Windows-specific functionality, was rather small (on the order of a few manweeks). I have a hard time believing that. I used to write to the Windows internals API a lot (the kind of stuff you see on sysinternals), and I can't imagine the sql server team not doing the same. That stuff was not easily ported to Linux, at least in the late 90's / early 00's.

andreadallera 15y ago
Exactly what i thought. Plus, from a marketing point of view, porting sqlserver to unix would have been suicide for Microsoft given their primary objective (for what concernes the server market) since XP is to enlarge their market to the server world. sqlserver is the main reason to have a windows machine at all if your team develops with .NET.
- eropple 15y ago
  I disagree. The main reasons I develop in .NET (as opposed to Mono) are tooling and performance. SQL Server is helpful in the cases where I need a RDBMS, but connecting to one's database of choice is generally painless.
zrail 15y ago
The guts of SQL Server were (and as far as I know still are) a RDBMS named Sybase that MS bought sometime in the mid '90s. Sybase ran perfectly fine on Unix, just without all the GUI crap.
- lrobb 15y ago
  Originally that was true, but the author mentions NT4 and I believe MS rewrote the engine specifically for NT...
- BarkMore 15y ago
  See http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-to-linux/#comment-664 http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-t... for a history of the SQL Server guts. It is now a complete rewrite of the Sybase code.
  - zrail 15y ago
    Oh, that's fascinating. Thanks!
BarkMore 15y ago
A single engineer got SQL Server up and running on Linux with a few weeks of effort. Berenson killed the project after this work was done. It would have taken significantly more effort to bring the server to product quality on multiple *nix platforms.
feralchimp 15y ago
That had the ring of truth to me, and I've done a significant amount of porting to IBM z/OS and IBM System i (each of which have a lot higher 'weirdness' quotient than NT --> Unix. If there is a compiler on the platform for the language in which the product is authored, getting core functionality standing up and walking can often be accomplished in a shockingly short timeframe. Getting things to run well, properly documented, interfacing as desired with other components on the system, and effectively marketed to a different audience...much harder and time/resource intensive.

by lrobb 15y ago

andreadallera 15y ago

Exactly what i thought. Plus, from a marketing point of view, porting sqlserver to unix would have been suicide for Microsoft given their primary objective (for what concernes the server market) since XP is to enlarge their market to the server world. sqlserver is the main reason to have a windows machine at all if your team develops with .NET.

eropple 15y ago
I disagree. The main reasons I develop in .NET (as opposed to Mono) are tooling and performance. SQL Server is helpful in the cases where I need a RDBMS, but connecting to one's database of choice is generally painless.

zrail 15y ago

The guts of SQL Server were (and as far as I know still are) a RDBMS named Sybase that MS bought sometime in the mid '90s. Sybase ran perfectly fine on Unix, just without all the GUI crap.

lrobb 15y ago
Originally that was true, but the author mentions NT4 and I believe MS rewrote the engine specifically for NT...
BarkMore 15y ago
See http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-to-linux/#comment-664 http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-t... for a history of the SQL Server guts. It is now a complete rewrite of the Sybase code.
- zrail 15y ago
  Oh, that's fascinating. Thanks!

BarkMore 15y ago

A single engineer got SQL Server up and running on Linux with a few weeks of effort. Berenson killed the project after this work was done. It would have taken significantly more effort to bring the server to product quality on multiple *nix platforms.

feralchimp 15y ago

That had the ring of truth to me, and I've done a significant amount of porting to IBM z/OS and IBM System i (each of which have a lot higher 'weirdness' quotient than NT --> Unix. If there is a compiler on the platform for the language in which the product is authored, getting core functionality standing up and walking can often be accomplished in a shockingly short timeframe. Getting things to run well, properly documented, interfacing as desired with other components on the system, and effectively marketed to a different audience...much harder and time/resource intensive.