MS SQL on Linux?

Sitting at home on a Saturday night, watching a little tube with the family and dreaming of playing with the server I have sitting in my basement.  Now, I do like hanging out with my family and I enjoy our Saturday movie nights, especially with movie snacks!  Heck, we have even been known to stop by an actual movie theater to grab some authentic movie theater popcorn and candy!

With all of that being said, I have been working on a project lately involving a lot of different types of databases and as I work almost entirely on Linux boxes, I went looking for a new database browsing tool for my newly installed q4OS Debian distro on my laptop.  In the past I have used DBeaver or Squirrel SQL with varying degrees of satisfaction and one of the only reasons I still use Windows is due to the ease and allure of SQL Management Studio.

Much to my surprise, I found that Microsoft now has their own database management tool for Linux, Azure Data Studio.  I quickly installed ADS and had it up and running in a few moments.  I won't go into detail here on the install portion as Microsoft has it very well documented on their site and install went off without a hitch.  

After install, I tried to connect to the first of my databases and received an error, provider: SSL Provider, error: 31.  As I use OpenSSL, I popped into /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf and at the very bottom of the file, changed CipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=2 to CipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=1 and retried the connection.  The database connection was successful and I began using my new toy!  

Azure Data Studio has most of the same features and functionality as SQL Management Studio.  It has the ability to connect to other database types as well, just click on view and then extensions and select the driver for several other database types.  As I am currently developing a solution for and Oracle database, a Sybase database and MariaDB, I installed those extensions and tested connectivity to those systems as well.

After spending my morning installing, configuring and testing Azure Data Studio, it got my mind to thinking that I should try MS SQL in my Docker setup again and see how well that will pair with my new set of database tools, though that will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon as it is Saturday night after all, and it is still movie night!