Microsoft have just announced that they will be releasing a version of SQL Server 2016 for the Linux operating system. This is a welcome move away from Microsoft’s historical stance of not releasing software for open source operating systems. They are starting to embrace the open source community more and more, giving end users what they want. They even support Linux operating systems on their Azure cloud platform.
Its only available in the form of an early private preview, with the final release planned for mid 2017. Hopefully they open up the preview to more people in the near future.
Microsoft’s announcement today comes just a few days before their planned SQL 2016 event in New York. (Planned for the 10th of March 2016. Click here for details).
We will need to wait to see what the SQL Server 2016 event in New York tells us, but hopefully there will be a wide range of SQL Server options available for Linux, including the free ‘Express’ versions, which might even put a dent in MySQL’s install base.
Will we see LAMP stacks consisting of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 in the near future? Its looking very possible.
For more information you can check out the Microsoft blog article at https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/
