SQL Server on Linux: Hath Hell Frozen Over?

March 08, 2016

By: Al Gillen, Carl W. Olofson

IDC's Quick Take

Microsoft has decided it is time to move its server applications to alternative OS platforms. This is a
dramatic but necessary move for the company to remain competitive and opens up the total
addressable market for SQL Server by a significant margin.

Product Announcement Highlights

As part of the rollout activities for SQL Server 2016, Microsoft dropped a bomb when it disclosed in a
blog that SQL Server 2016 is being ported over to run on Linux.
Simply stated, this announcement is both stunning and an incredible statement about how objectively
the new Microsoft is looking at opportunities today and potential opportunities for tomorrow. The old
Microsoft would have defended Windows to the death, and part of that defense included keeping the
crown jewels all in a single box. In other words, Microsoft's server products would remain Windows only
forever.
But that was then, and today the Microsoft that CEO Satya Nadella has formed out of the old, more
proprietary Microsoft has demonstrated that it intends to evolve with the industry around it. The
company has already moved to support competitive operating systems on mobile devices, with the
company having brought Microsoft Office and Office 365 over to iOS and Android. Other products such
as Microsoft Intune and Azure AD also offer support for non-Microsoft devices. In the case of server
infrastructure, the reality is that Microsoft no longer has the luxury of ignoring the competition on the
presumption that it will fade away over time.
Microsoft's disclosure of its internal project, code-named Helsinki, includes porting SQL Server to
multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server. It is not clear what the exact rollout is for distribution support, although early briefings suggest
that, as a popular developer platform, Ubuntu is likely to be the first distribution in the early code
releases. We would assume that the mainstream commercial distributions Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will be supported long before a formal product is released in 2H17,
since the commercial market for SQL Server is most likely to be on Red Hat and SUSE today.
The product is still over a year away from general availability, although developer preview code drops
are expected to start almost immediately.

IDC's Point of View

When Nadella sat down in the CEO seat at Microsoft, he immediately proclaimed his strategy as being
"mobile first, cloud first." That strategy did not include the words "Windows first," and it is becoming
increasingly evident that Nadella not only remains true to his vision but that he has successfully focused
his divisional leads to think that way as well.
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The strategy of ignoring the competition and not porting its server software products to competitive OS
platforms worked in the battle against Unix in the 1990s and early 2000s, partly because it was Linux
and Windows not Windows alone that caused substantial damage to the Unix market. The
Windows volume made the x86 server market initially viable and, over time, attractive and desirable.
The vast numbers of servers being produced and the processors those Windows servers consumed gave
Intel the funding to reinvest in the x86 processor family, adding features and capabilities that extended
reliability, scalability, and performance.
In turn, the benefits of better x86 processors were also leveraged by the Linux community, creating a
competitive threat that largely became possible because of the volumes Microsoft was driving. Today,
Linux server shipments constitute a substantial minority portion of total shipments.
The company's "cloud first" strategy previously has been highlighted by important moves such as adding
IaaS VM support in Microsoft Azure for a multitude of Linux distributions at present count six
(CentOS, openSUSE, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu).
Of particular note is the relatively recent addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Microsoft and Red Hat
had struggled with an impasse literally for years, but whatever legal hang-ups blocked the way were
finally resolved during Nadella's watch.
The company is absolutely making the right move. This is not about the lack of opportunity for SQL
Server installations atop of Windows Server; it is about repositioning SQL Server as a solution for nextgeneration applications. Classic distributed server (2nd Platform) applications continue to be not only
viable and critical but most will survive well into the future, probably to the tune of 20+ years. Sure, that
sounds like a crazy number but think about the 1st Platform applications that failed to be killed off by
the year 2000 date code crisis. The majority of those applications, which were already long in the tooth,
were remediated and put back into service, and most continue to be used today. By comparison, 2nd
Platform applications have hardly even hit middle age yet.
Any comprehensive analysis of the RDBMS market over the past 30 years should indicate that, while
Microsoft SQL Server has grown well over that period, it has grown mainly on its own merits, especially
since the introduction of SQL Server 2000, rather than because of its platform. In fact, it could be argued
that Linux could have represented a significant growth opportunity during that period. This is all, of
course, speculation, but what is clear is that, as many datacenter managers are looking for moderately
priced, full-function RDBMS products to operate on Linux, they have had to overlook SQL Server, until
now.
As part of the digital transformation being undertaken as part of the move to 3rd Platform applications,
customers are reconsidering their development model and the preferred scenario we see unfolding is
for a mostly open source environment. That stack starts at the OS layer, with Linux, and layers on open
source virtualization, containerization, orchestration, open source middleware, open source application
frameworks and, most important in the context of the Helsinki announcement, a variety of data stores,
both open source and classic relational databases.
The growth of Linux as a platform in public cloud is driving market share up quickly. According to IDC's
Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, 39.5% of all new x86 servers entering the market in the one-year
period from 4Q14 through 3Q15 were sold with the Linux operating system. Of those new Linux servers,
IDC Workloads research indicates over one-third of those new Linux servers had a function in a

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relational database or a database-like role. It is hard to overlook a meaningful market opportunity like
this.
The reality is that most organizations are not going to be able to build their entire stack out of open
source software components and some critical components are likely to remain closed source. Data
stores, being particularly important, are as good a candidate to remain closed source as any, or at least
to be serviced by a mix of open source and closed source solutions.
Microsoft certainly has not gone so far as to open source SQL Server (and has not implied it will), nor
should the company be worrying about that step. But, by making SQL Server available as a component
of what is largely an open source stack, Microsoft has the potential to capture incremental installations.
While it's far too early to talk about pricing models, one would assume Microsoft will offer some sort of
pay-as-you-go option for customers that embrace SQL Server on Linux.
For more traditional DBMS workloads, having SQL Server available on Linux puts a stake in the ground
that directly challenges Oracle and IBM DB2 as the closed source DBMS for open source environments.
For purists, there are open source databases, and lots of nonrelational data structures that are
alternatives, but few of them offer the scalability of commercial solutions and have the option to move
that data over to SQL Server on Azure if or when needs dictated such a move.
Ultimately, we believe this move is a pragmatic decision that should extend the opportunities for SQL
Server but, at the same time, having little presumably no negative impact on SQL Server on
Windows. This is not the Microsoft of the 1990s or even the 2000s; what you are seeing is the Microsoft
of the future, and that's a good thing.

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