Category: setup

This week there was an update of SQL Server vNext, the new version is 14.0.200.24. Also the mssql-tools package was updated to version 14.0.2.0-1. This update resulted in me losing the sqlcmd and bcp utilities.

In my previous post, I mentioned that the packages you need to install are mssql-server and mssql-tools.

To find out which files are installed with the sqlserver packages I executed the dpkg-query command (on ubuntu):

dpkg-query -L mssql-tools

This returned the following list:
/opt/mssql-tools/share/resources/en_US/BatchParserGrammar.llr
/opt/mssql-tools/share/resources/en_US/BatchParserGrammar.dfa
/opt/mssql-tools/share/resources/en_US/SQLCMD.rll
/opt/mssql-tools/share/resources/en_US/bcp.rll
/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd-13.0.1.0
/opt/mssql-tools/bin/bcp-13.0.1.0
/usr/share/doc/mssql-tools/THIRDPARTYNOTICES.txt
/usr/share/doc/mssql-tools/LICENSE.txt

So… there is a file called sqlcmd-13.0.1.0, but no symlink to it from /usr/bin.
To manually create the missing links:

 sudo ln -sfn /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd-13.0.1.0 /usr/bin/sqlcmd 
 sudo ln -sfn /opt/mssql-tools/bin/bcp-13.0.1.0 /usr/bin/bcp

This information is documented here, however instead of just documenting I would rather that the installation took care of this step.

Today I did my first installation of SQL Server on Linux and it was a breeze. Just “apt-get install mssql-server” and “apt-get install mssql-tools”.  Then connect to the server with “sqlcmd -S localhost -U sa” and voilà:

You can find the full installation guide here.
Throughout the years I have done a lot of SQL Server installations but today was by far the fastest.

Christmas time is coming and I will spent some of it on testing SQL Server on Linux and going through all the configuration settings of mssql-conf.

I have been a SQL Server DBA for more than 20 years and on March 7 of this year, Microsoft announced that they will make the server available on Linux.

Besides being a SQL Server DBA, I am also a Python programmer and on this site I want to combine these skills.

I will regularly install SQL Server on different distro’s with different settings and then run a set of performance tests. This will hopefully give some insight into which distro, and which settings, yields the best performance for SQL Server.