Comment by stackskipton
13 hours ago
As former Windows person who still uses fair amount of Powershell on Linux, I was interested.
However, reading the summary left me confused like you don't understand what's happening at Microsoft.
> Hopefully Microsoft will spend more time in the future on their server product strategy and less on Copilot ;-)
The future product strategy is clear, it's Linux for servers. .Net runs on Linux, generally with much better performance. Microsoft internally on Azure is using Linux a ton and Windows Server is legacy and hell, MSSQL is legacy. Sure, they will continue to sell it because if you want to give them thousands of dollars, they would be idiots to turn it down but it's no longer a focus.
in no way that I can see is MSSQL or Server "legacy".
The only people using MSSQL Server are people deep, deep in the Microsoft ecosystem. Think government work, and those unlucky enough to work at a pure Microsoft shop where every problem looks like a Microsoft or Azure solution.
It's not a dominant database anywhere on the outside.
We're a B2B shop migrating to MSSQL, from SQL Anywhere. Managed MSSQL in Azure is fairly easy operationally, especially since we don't have a dedicated DBA and our support staff aren't SQL gurus.
However since we now got the tools for running on both, and experience migrating, we might be moving to PostgreSQL at some point in not too distant future. Managed MSSQL in Azure is not cheap.
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I think this is more your bias, it's also regional as different places in the world seem to use these things way more than other parts. Really quick search shows it's used a LOT outside of the areas you mentioned. The place it's not really used? startups... it's the #3 DB in the world.
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We are on the outside, for the types of customers we serve it is MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or some SaaS product that you can only access via GraphQL.
Very seldom I use something like Postegres, last time was in 2018.
I've worked for plenty of companies using MsSql.
They have all been dotnet ecosystem, but self hosted rather than Azure
I think the latest versions of SQL Server also run on Linux now.
Heh. State government is the only place I've encounter MSSQL in the past 10 years.
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This is like saying nobody eats at McDonald’s because they have more competition now. It’s not wrong from a certain perspective but that’s still a huge number of customers.
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On the flip side, every single MSSQL instance that I've encountered has been legacy. For at least five years.
For mid sized businesses, where you're mostly just doing some business reporting, a single mssql instance makes for a great and very cheap 'data warehouse'. All the auth magically works for people to connect with Excel, and powerbi+cloud just works out of the box.
I'd be curious what a better/non-legacy solution is! (as I do this stuff haha, and don't see much else other than full cloud options, sf etc)
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It's "legacy" because it's essentially tied to Windows. Yes, technically it works on Linux, and no doubt that was an amazing feat, but no serious company is running MSSQL on Linux when all the documentation, all the best practices are all based on running that on Windows.
Why did they port it to Linux?
Knowing nothing about this, I wonder if they're getting ready to retire Windows Server, and wanted to get their server products off it?
Edit: How they did it is also quite fascinating:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/blog/2016/12/16/s...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/
>a key contribution of Drawbridge is a version of Windows that has been enlightened to run within a single Drawbridge picoprocess.
MSSQL on Linux only seems to use parts of that project (a smaller abstraction layer), but that's still super cool.
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Even Microsoft considers Microsoft SQL Server legacy! It's had virtually no new features added between 2022 and 2025 other than AI and cloud integration. All the truly capable people have long since left that team and moved into various Azure and Fabric teams.
To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten, there's like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server and he's "too busy" to implement SDK-style SQL Server Data Projects for Visual Studio. He's distracted by, you guessed it, support for Fabric's dialect of SQL for which the only tooling is Visual Studio Code (not VS 2026).
There's people screaming at Microsoft that they have VS solutions with hundreds of .NET 10 and SQL projects, and now they can't open it their flagship IDE product because the SQL team office at Redmond has cloth draped over the furnite and the lights are all off except over one cubicle.
Also: There still isn't support for Microsoft Azure v6 or v7 virtual machines in Microsoft SQL Server because they just don't have the staff to keep up with the low-level code changes required to support SSD over NVMe with 8 KB atomicity. Think about how insanely understaffed they must be if they're unable to implement 8 KB cluster support in a database engine that uses 8 KB pages!!!
They also still don't have ASP.NET Core support for SQL Server Reporting Services - you're stuck in ASP.NET Web Forms land if you want to embed reports in your app.
> like one guy working on developer tooling for SQL Server
As somebody who's been procrastinating on getting my main project off of SSDT,
We can all tell.
Azure services run on [customized] Hyper-V, thus Windows Server.
Azure networking is Linux.
EDIT: Marvel at the NT4 style Task Manager [0].
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...
Microsoft just upstreamed support for running Linux as the Hyper-V equivalent of Dom0, so no Windows required.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Improves-Hyper-V
That is still a very long way until Azure Host OS gets replaced.
Guessing some of Azure networking (or storage controllers) might even be BSD based ?