Installing SQL Server on Linux

A post on installing SQL Server on Linux, following the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Guide (Red Hat).

Install SQL Server

1. Get connected & download the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Red Hat repository configuration file.

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/mssql-server.repo https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/8/mssql-server-2019.repo

2. Install SQL Server.

sudo yum install -y mssql-server

3. Run mssql-conf setup to choose the SQL Server Edition, SA password and accepting of the Licence Agreement.

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

4. Check the SQL Server service by running systemctl status.

systemctl status mssql-server

5. Allow in remote 1433 connections.

I’m using Firewalld as per Microsoft’s guide – here’s my quick install notes.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=1433/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

1. Download the Microsoft Red Hat repo config file.

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/msprod.repo https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/8/prod.repo

2. Install ODBC driver for SQL Server (Linux) – allows BCP & SQLCMD.

sudo yum install -y mssql-tools unixODBC-devel

3. Add mssql-tools to PATH environment variable – allows tools to be run without full path.

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Using the PATH variable above, call sqlcmd:

I’m connecting to the EC2 Amazon Linux SQL Server instance via SSMS on my local machine (Windows 10).

For this to work we had to allow in remote 1433 connections (step 5 during install above), and I added my IP into the AWS Security Group.