Installing SQL Server in a Container

[@aravindspring]

Good tutorial. Helped me to start on docker and SQL server.

[@ravilobo7977]

Thank you Kevin. Has there been any progress on AD authentication for SQL Server on containers? When we tried last time, it was a convoluted process. That kind of stopped us from using it in our environment.

[@KevinFeasel]

Thanks, Ravi. Yeah, AD authentication is still a little painful. That said, Amit Khandelwal has a walkthrough at techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server-blog/ad-active-directory-authentication-for-sql-containers-on-azure/ba-p/2745659 and Microsoft Learn has some good content at learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-ad-auth-understanding?view=sql-server-ver16 and learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-containers-ad-auth-adutil-tutorial?view=sql-server-ver16. I'm not sure when you last tried it but having a couple more walkthroughs does help lessen the pain, at least.

[@ravilobo7977]

@@KevinFeasel Thanks a bunch! Will have to give it another go. You can't deny there's a steep learning curve here. Some stuff on the links is non-dba. The fact that MS gave a boot to BDC is discouraging. Spent months to learn K8S. Thank you for all the use-cases for SS on containers. All very good. Do you have any production use-cases?

[@emo05mi]

Yoo Kevin thank you for this wonderful tutorial. Do you know how to use a domain name to access the sql server? when i try the knowledge i know of then this the output. "a connection was successfully established with the ubuntu server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake" When i try to connect thru local ip it is successful but when connecting to public ip it is getting some error. i tried allowing the ports from the firewall. ps. im using ubuntu linux with mssql installed on docker.

[@KevinFeasel]

There are a couple of ways I can interpret your question: 1. You have the container on physical machine A and are trying to connect to it from physical machine B. In that case, I'd expect that you would need to open up firewall ports (1433 or 51433 or whatever you have set the external port to) on physical machine A. There shouldn't be much else required for that interaction. 2. You want to connect to the container either from another container on physical machine A or from the main operating system on physical machine A. In that case, it sounds like there's some disconnect where the host name doesn't map to a given IP+port combo. If you're trying to use host names within containers, you might need to set up a Docker network: stackoverflow.com/questions/30545023/how-to-communicate-between-docker-containers-via-hostname and docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/network_connect/ are good resources for getting started there, as well as stackoverflow.com/questions/50705736/docker-container-unable-to-connect-to-sql-server-by-name. All of this does get a bit easier if you're using Kubernetes or Docker Compose to orchestrate containers on a network but each of those adds its own administrative complexity.