Enlarge (credit: Tom Hilton)

When in March this year Microsoft announced that it was bringing SQL Server to Linux the reaction was one of surprise, with the announcement prompting two big questions: why and how?

SQL Server is one of Microsoft’s major Windows applications, helping to drive Windows sales and keep people on the Windows platform. If you can run SQL Server on Linux, well, that’s one less reason to use Windows.

And while SQL Server does share heritage with Sybase SQL Server (now called SAP ASE), a Unix database server that Microsoft ported to Windows, that happened a long time ago. Since 1993, when Sybase and Microsoft went their separate ways, the products have diverged and, for the last 23 years, Microsoft SQL Server has been strictly a Windows application. That doesn’t normally make for easy porting.