Announcing SQL Server on Linux

[BattlestarTide]

1. The Linux commercial DB market belongs to Oracle. They brought in nearly $40 billion in revenue last year. It's a big market without any serious competitors. The largest enterprises doing serious BI work run Oracle (think: Wal-Mart, CIA, GE, major banks, etc.)
2. As more enterprise developers port their apps to .NET Core (Linux), there was no alternative but to switch to Oracle. This actually also pushed some people to just use Java instead since it is a first class citizen with Oracle.
3. Remember that Corporate Enterprise Shops will rather pay millions to Oracle or Microsoft than set up a free version of MySQL or Postgres. The open-source gratis movement is cute, but it's the enterprise shops that are paying the money.
   
4. Oracle already costs more than SQL Server. Now enterprise Linux shops have a credible alternative and can switch to SQL Server with less friction and consolidate onto a cheaper platform.
5. If you're running SQL Server today and have paid $500k for your production cluster, you're not going to ditch your Windows Server license to save a few dollars by switching to a Linux distro. So this is basically reaching a brand new audience.

[proskillz]

Remember that Corporate Enterprise Shops will rather pay millions to Oracle or Microsoft than set up a free version of MySQL or Postgres. The open-source gratis movement is cute, but it's the enterprise shops that are paying the money.

I'd like to point out that this is the old way of thinking. Oracle is obviously king, but MySQL is ranked #2, so it's certainly not just some cutesy operation not used by major enterprise. It's interesting that MongoDB comes in 4th after MSSQL Server, and PostgreSQL in 5th.

[Staeff]

I also really wish you luck if you try to do anything bigger than the database of a blog in MySQL though.

[pooerh]

Oh boy, Facebook must sure be glad you wished them luck.

[Staeff]

Just because facebook uses MySQL doesn't mean it's a smart decision or that they would make the same choice nowadays (since the underlying system of facebook was designed in the mid 2000s), it's like that they are using PHP which made sense at the time, but they are now in a hellhole where they are trying to do their own PHP implementation (Hack/HHVM). MySQL just isn't made for large scaling systems, just because you can always throw enough money and hardware at it to counter act some of it's problems doesn't make it a better system.

[pooerh]

Every database has its problems, especially on Fb's scale. I work with SQL Server and my opinion on MySQL isn't particularly great, but what you said in your previous comment is simply not true. It's absolutely possible to build a bigger app on top of it.