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How Much Linux Do You Need?

SQL Server on Linux was released with version 2017. Since then, I've seen some deployments of SQL Server on Linux, but many of the customers I work with still deploy SQL Server on Windows. While there are limitations and unsupported features, most of what we need is available in SQL Server on Linux.

I assume most of you out there work on Windows machines against Windows servers. Maybe some of you run containers, but that's likely a minority. Windows seems to have won the desktop and for most of us running SQL Server, the server room as well.

However, if you use containers, you likely use Linux ones since SQL Server isn't supported on Windows containers. I know I do, and I like them, but overall, I find I need to know very little Linux to do my job, or even work with the containers.

I like Linux. As someone who learned Unix early on and installed Linux 0.8, I thought at one point I'd spend most of my career in that world. Especially as I worked with DOS and Windows 3.1 in corporate work and found them much less capable. I still remember writing grep.bat and awk.bat files to duplicate some of the things I did in Unix on DOS machines.

For doing database work, most platforms are ported to Windows, but even if you connect to an Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/MongoDB/etc. system running on Linux, do you need much linux? I find that ls, pwd, and cat get me through most of the things I need to do. When there's something more complex, like sudo systemctl restart mssql-server, there are plenty of code snippets in the docs or some website. These days, you could even ask an AI how to do many simple tasks.

If you don't use Linux, then you don't need any, but if you deal with any sort of system running on Linux, how much is important to know? What's your top ten list of things a newbie should learn? Let us know today.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Implementing Vector Datatype with Azure SQL Server

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This article shows how to insert data into a database, create embeddings, and then use this data to search the data with a natural language interface.
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  Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
 

Precision and Scale II
What is the precision, scale, and length for an int variable?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.
 

 

  Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

The Rank Window

I have this table and data:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[SalesTracking] ( [SalesDate] [datetime] NULL, [SalesPersonID] [int] NULL, [CustomerID] [int] NOT NULL, [PONumber] [varchar] (80) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL, [paid] [bit] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [SalesTrackingCDX] ON [dbo].[SalesTracking] ([SalesDate]) ON [PRIMARY] GO INSERT dbo.SalesTracking (SalesDate, SalesPersonID, CustomerID, PONumber, paid, total) VALUES ('2024-03-15 10:45:55.067', 1, 1,'PO965' ,1, 100), ('2023-09-24 10:45:55.067', 1, 2,'PO627' ,1, 200), ('2022-07-02 10:45:55.067', 1, 3,'PO6' ,1, 300), ('2022-11-03 10:45:55.067', 1, 4,'PO283' ,1, 400), ('2022-11-26 10:45:55.067', 1, 5,'PO735' ,1, 500), ('2023-04-28 10:45:55.067', 1, 6,'PO407' ,1, 600), ('2022-09-09 10:45:55.067', 1, 7,'PO484' ,1, 700), ('2024-03-13 10:45:55.067', 1, 8,'PO344' ,1, 700), ('2024-04-24 10:45:55.067', 1, 9,'PO254' ,1, 800), ('2022-06-19 10:45:55.067', 1, 10,'PO344',1, 800) GO

When I run this query, how many unique values are returned for the SaleRank column?

SELECT st.SalesDate , st.SalesPersonID , st.total , RANK () OVER (PARTITION BY st.SalesPersonID ORDER BY st.total desc) AS SaleRank FROM dbo.SalesTracking AS st;

Answer: 8

Explanation: There are 8 unique values: 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. The RANK puts the same ordinal for tied values and then skips the appropriate number. Since there are 2 1s, 2 is skipped and the next value is 3. Ref: RANK - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/rank-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

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