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Installing MSSQL on Linux Ubuntu
The rivalry between Oracle DB Engine and Microsoft MSSQL has been around for years. It’s like Brazil vs. Argentina in soccer, or Celtics vs. Lakers in basketball. MSSQL wasn’t as robust and powerful as Oracle used to be. Oracle was command-line and Linux-based only, while MSSQL was GUI-based and Windows-only. But things have changed. The gap is closing every year. Now, we can install MSSQL on Linux, and for the most part, the experience isn’t that bad.
Let me show you how I was able to install MSSQL on Ubuntu 24.01.1 LTS. The setup is a little tricky. The Microsoft repository doesn’t include some required libraries, but with some Google Fu (and persistence), I found the missing libraries. Now, I have an AWS EC2 instance of Ubuntu Linux running SQL Server 2022.
My VM resides on AWS Cloud for versatility reasons. I needed something I could use both at work and at home, so I went for a cloud solution. However, this can easily be done on any personal laptop using Ubuntu Server (Noble).
Here are the detailed steps, which I repeated twice to ensure accuracy. I may tear things down later, so I needed clear steps I could reuse in the future. I’ll probably use Terraform or another IaC solution to automate this (God bless AWS).
