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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

> Any valid use cases?

I'm personally a fully competent Linux sysadmin, and an extremely incompetent Windows sysadmin.

SQL Server is great, I love .NET, and the only thing holding me back all these years has been the Windows system requirement.

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I consider myself a first-rate Linux sysadmin, and a perfectly competent Windows sysadmin as well, but this is a position I can't wrap my head around. If you're willing to pay thousands of dollars for a properly-licensed SQL Server install, why do you care if it needs to run on Windows? I would normally assume you don't want the license cost of the OS, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall licensing cost.

The only thing I see MSSQL on Linux being useful for is for development and testing purposes before deployment to a local server farm or the Azure cloud. (Even then, why not just run it on your Windows dev machine?) Honest question: What's the scenario where you'd license a system to run on Linux in production? To me, this is interesting, from the virtualization standpoint, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

You might want to use MSSQL as a database and be able to sell your product to companies that do not have Windows servers around (and no staff with experience running them). And Microsoft wants to allow you to do that so you don't start building integrations with other databases to support those clients, and then those take MSSQL sales away.

And even in companies that have Windows MSSQL on Linux might be useful, e.g. if they have a linux-centric virtualization infrastructure.

> why do you care if it needs to run on Windows? I would normally assume you don't want the license cost of the OS, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall licensing cost.

At my company we had a single Windows server for aaaaages that we kept around because of a legacy MSSQL install we needed. Only Windows box in the whole server farm. Was a bit of a pain.

Of course, MSSQL-on-Linux wouldn't necessarily have been the answer here... I'm sure we would have had to buy a new MSSQL license to run it on Linux.

Eventually we eliminated the need for it entirely, but had MSSQL-on-Linux been an option a few years ago we might have simply migrated it to Linux and paid the necessary license.

> Even then, why not just run it on your Windows dev machine?

A lot of devs don't understand/like windows enough to work on it. It's probably a lot easier to find *nix devs that windows devs.

If MSSQL runs on a synology nas, then a lot of smaller companies can save a lot of money, because they wouldn't need a huge server anymore.

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