3 ms·

in no way that I can see is MSSQL or Server "legacy".

by keithnz 6mo ago

chaps 6mo ago
On the flip side, every single MSSQL instance that I've encountered has been legacy. For at least five years.
- Incipient 6mo ago
  For mid sized businesses, where you're mostly just doing some business reporting, a single mssql instance makes for a great and very cheap 'data warehouse'. All the auth magically works for people to connect with Excel, and powerbi+cloud just works out of the box. I'd be curious what a better/non-legacy solution is! (as I do this stuff haha, and don't see much else other than full cloud options, sf etc)
  - chaps 6mo ago
    These days I think airtable and other "no code" systems fit this bill well.
    - trollbridge 6mo ago
      MSSQL doesn’t come with usage based pricing.
      - chaps 6mo ago
        Sure, but you're just shifting that cost elsewhere. Not defending the no-code services (they're extremely predatory), just that it's not as simple as cost-vs-no-cost.
Alupis 6mo ago
The only people using MSSQL Server are people deep, deep in the Microsoft ecosystem. Think government work, and those unlucky enough to work at a pure Microsoft shop where every problem looks like a Microsoft or Azure solution. It's not a dominant database anywhere on the outside.
- icedchai 6mo ago
  Heh. State government is the only place I've encounter MSSQL in the past 10 years.
  - Loudergood 6mo ago
    It's common as the backend to a lot of SMB scale ERP and CRM solutions. But almost all of those run on SQL Express.
    - thewebguyd 6mo ago
      Which can also run on Linux now.
    - ssl-3 6mo ago
      I know of a couple of rather fancy, proprietary 2-way radio trunking systems products that use local MS SQL on the back end, to keep track of configs for individual subscriber radios and system configurations for the radio repeaters. (What's that? Well, if you ever walk into a place like a gigantic oil refinery, you'll see a bunch of people working there. If you look long enough, you'll notice that each of them have an expensive-looking radio ("walkie talkie") on their hip. Some of those radios may be my fault -- and of those that are, there's an MS SQL database that knows exactly how it was programmed. But I didn't pick it; that's just how the system operates.)
      - womod 6mo ago
        Yup, thanks big M for making things fun as usual. I deal with the same thing on the P25 side.
        ssl-3 6mo ago
        I don't mind Radio Management, per se. It's a nice idea. It just feels broken and internally-disjointed when it isn't falling flat on its face. We almost got into bits of the P25 side to help service $giant_government_entity's system, but the GTR 8000 training was complete ass. Mostly what we got out of it was long periods of the dude fretting about the clutch job that his Hyundai was in the shop for and talking on the phone about that, interspersed with a repeated slogan of "I was a Navy man. I don't know what makes sense to you, but I do things by memorizing steps instead of understanding how they work." Sometimes, he'd get around to mentioning some of those steps. Much waste, very disappoint. We all very thoroughly failed the test at the end of that week.
aninteger 6mo ago
It's "legacy" because it's essentially tied to Windows. Yes, technically it works on Linux, and no doubt that was an amazing feat, but no serious company is running MSSQL on Linux when all the documentation, all the best practices are all based on running that on Windows.
- andai 6mo ago
  Why did they port it to Linux? Knowing nothing about this, I wonder if they're getting ready to retire Windows Server, and wanted to get their server products off it? Edit: How they did it is also quite fascinating: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/sql-server-on-linux-how-introduction https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/s... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/ >a key contribution of Drawbridge is a version of Windows that has been enlightened to run within a single Drawbridge picoprocess. MSSQL on Linux only seems to use parts of that project (a smaller abstraction layer), but that's still super cool.
  - jiggawatts 6mo ago
    The "why" is for Kubernetes and Docker support. For example, the Aspire.NET orchestrator pulls the Linux docker image of SQL Server in much the same way as it does for MySQL or Postgres.
  - spijdar 6mo ago
    Wait until you read about the version they released for ARM, briefly! It had a dynamic recompiler which would produced ARM64 ELF libraries from Windows PE executables, allowing x86_64 MSSQL to run on ARM Linux! They ditched that once Rosetta support on ARM Macs was good enough to run x86_64 VMs, as apparently all they cared about was supporting Docker on Macs... I think it is essentially "complete drawbridge", too. I haven't played around with it in a while, but from memory, you can coerce it to run arbitrary Windows executables, basically anything without graphics (which are missing from the PAL they ship). It's quite impressive, though also necessary if you think about it. SQL Server requires the legacy dot net stack, AND it also ships with a full copy of the msvc compiler/linker! Not sure if that's ever used by the Linux port, but it is installed. MSSQL kind of exercises every inch of the Windows API surface. You can even run e.g. xp_dirtree and see an overlay of the host disk along with Drawbridge's copy of Windows.
jiggawatts 6mo ago
Even Microsoft considers Microsoft SQL Server legacy! It's had virtually no new features added between 2022 and 2025 other than AI and cloud integration. All the truly capable people have long since left that team and moved into various Azure and Fabric teams. To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten, there's like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server and he's "too busy" to implement SDK-style SQL Server Data Projects for Visual Studio. He's distracted by, you guessed it, support for Fabric's dialect of SQL for which the only tooling is Visual Studio Code (not VS 2026). There's people screaming at Microsoft that they have VS solutions with hundreds of .NET 10 and SQL projects, and now they can't open it their flagship IDE product because the SQL team office at Redmond has cloth draped over the furnite and the lights are all off except over one cubicle. Also: There still isn't support for Microsoft Azure v6 or v7 virtual machines in Microsoft SQL Server because they just don't have the staff to keep up with the low-level code changes required to support SSD over NVMe with 8 KB atomicity. Think about how insanely understaffed they must be if they're unable to implement 8 KB cluster support in a database engine that uses 8 KB pages!!!
- Pxtl 6mo ago
  > like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server As somebody who's been procrastinating on getting my main project off of SSDT, We can all tell.
  - jiggawatts 6mo ago
    I wish someone in Microsoft understood how incredibly corrosive to customer trust their new AI-first, cloud-only attitude is. "We're meeting our KPIs at your expense!"
- Uvix 6mo ago
  They also still don't have ASP.NET Core support for SQL Server Reporting Services - you're stuck in ASP.NET Web Forms land if you want to embed reports in your app.

in no way that I can see is MSSQL or Server "legacy".

by keithnz 6mo ago

in no way that I can see is MSSQL or Server "legacy".

chaps 6mo ago

On the flip side, every single MSSQL instance that I've encountered has been legacy. For at least five years.

Incipient 6mo ago
For mid sized businesses, where you're mostly just doing some business reporting, a single mssql instance makes for a great and very cheap 'data warehouse'. All the auth magically works for people to connect with Excel, and powerbi+cloud just works out of the box. I'd be curious what a better/non-legacy solution is! (as I do this stuff haha, and don't see much else other than full cloud options, sf etc)
- chaps 6mo ago
  These days I think airtable and other "no code" systems fit this bill well.
  - trollbridge 6mo ago
    MSSQL doesn’t come with usage based pricing.
    - chaps 6mo ago
      Sure, but you're just shifting that cost elsewhere. Not defending the no-code services (they're extremely predatory), just that it's not as simple as cost-vs-no-cost.

Alupis 6mo ago

The only people using MSSQL Server are people deep, deep in the Microsoft ecosystem. Think government work, and those unlucky enough to work at a pure Microsoft shop where every problem looks like a Microsoft or Azure solution. It's not a dominant database anywhere on the outside.

icedchai 6mo ago
Heh. State government is the only place I've encounter MSSQL in the past 10 years.
- Loudergood 6mo ago
  It's common as the backend to a lot of SMB scale ERP and CRM solutions. But almost all of those run on SQL Express.
  - thewebguyd 6mo ago
    Which can also run on Linux now.
  - ssl-3 6mo ago
    I know of a couple of rather fancy, proprietary 2-way radio trunking systems products that use local MS SQL on the back end, to keep track of configs for individual subscriber radios and system configurations for the radio repeaters. (What's that? Well, if you ever walk into a place like a gigantic oil refinery, you'll see a bunch of people working there. If you look long enough, you'll notice that each of them have an expensive-looking radio ("walkie talkie") on their hip. Some of those radios may be my fault -- and of those that are, there's an MS SQL database that knows exactly how it was programmed. But I didn't pick it; that's just how the system operates.)
    - womod 6mo ago
      Yup, thanks big M for making things fun as usual. I deal with the same thing on the P25 side.
      - ssl-3 6mo ago
        I don't mind Radio Management, per se. It's a nice idea. It just feels broken and internally-disjointed when it isn't falling flat on its face. We almost got into bits of the P25 side to help service $giant_government_entity's system, but the GTR 8000 training was complete ass. Mostly what we got out of it was long periods of the dude fretting about the clutch job that his Hyundai was in the shop for and talking on the phone about that, interspersed with a repeated slogan of "I was a Navy man. I don't know what makes sense to you, but I do things by memorizing steps instead of understanding how they work." Sometimes, he'd get around to mentioning some of those steps. Much waste, very disappoint. We all very thoroughly failed the test at the end of that week.

aninteger 6mo ago

It's "legacy" because it's essentially tied to Windows. Yes, technically it works on Linux, and no doubt that was an amazing feat, but no serious company is running MSSQL on Linux when all the documentation, all the best practices are all based on running that on Windows.

andai 6mo ago
Why did they port it to Linux? Knowing nothing about this, I wonder if they're getting ready to retire Windows Server, and wanted to get their server products off it? Edit: How they did it is also quite fascinating: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/sql-server-on-linux-how-introduction https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/s... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/ >a key contribution of Drawbridge is a version of Windows that has been enlightened to run within a single Drawbridge picoprocess. MSSQL on Linux only seems to use parts of that project (a smaller abstraction layer), but that's still super cool.
- jiggawatts 6mo ago
  The "why" is for Kubernetes and Docker support. For example, the Aspire.NET orchestrator pulls the Linux docker image of SQL Server in much the same way as it does for MySQL or Postgres.
- spijdar 6mo ago
  Wait until you read about the version they released for ARM, briefly! It had a dynamic recompiler which would produced ARM64 ELF libraries from Windows PE executables, allowing x86_64 MSSQL to run on ARM Linux! They ditched that once Rosetta support on ARM Macs was good enough to run x86_64 VMs, as apparently all they cared about was supporting Docker on Macs... I think it is essentially "complete drawbridge", too. I haven't played around with it in a while, but from memory, you can coerce it to run arbitrary Windows executables, basically anything without graphics (which are missing from the PAL they ship). It's quite impressive, though also necessary if you think about it. SQL Server requires the legacy dot net stack, AND it also ships with a full copy of the msvc compiler/linker! Not sure if that's ever used by the Linux port, but it is installed. MSSQL kind of exercises every inch of the Windows API surface. You can even run e.g. xp_dirtree and see an overlay of the host disk along with Drawbridge's copy of Windows.

jiggawatts 6mo ago

Even Microsoft considers Microsoft SQL Server legacy! It's had virtually no new features added between 2022 and 2025 other than AI and cloud integration. All the truly capable people have long since left that team and moved into various Azure and Fabric teams. To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten, there's like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server and he's "too busy" to implement SDK-style SQL Server Data Projects for Visual Studio. He's distracted by, you guessed it, support for Fabric's dialect of SQL for which the only tooling is Visual Studio Code (not VS 2026). There's people screaming at Microsoft that they have VS solutions with hundreds of .NET 10 and SQL projects, and now they can't open it their flagship IDE product because the SQL team office at Redmond has cloth draped over the furnite and the lights are all off except over one cubicle. Also: There still isn't support for Microsoft Azure v6 or v7 virtual machines in Microsoft SQL Server because they just don't have the staff to keep up with the low-level code changes required to support SSD over NVMe with 8 KB atomicity. Think about how insanely understaffed they must be if they're unable to implement 8 KB cluster support in a database engine that uses 8 KB pages!!!

Pxtl 6mo ago
> like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server As somebody who's been procrastinating on getting my main project off of SSDT, We can all tell.
- jiggawatts 6mo ago
  I wish someone in Microsoft understood how incredibly corrosive to customer trust their new AI-first, cloud-only attitude is. "We're meeting our KPIs at your expense!"
Uvix 6mo ago
They also still don't have ASP.NET Core support for SQL Server Reporting Services - you're stuck in ASP.NET Web Forms land if you want to embed reports in your app.