• Home
  • My Favorite Topics
    • Blogging
    • Business
    • Career
    • Cars
    • Consulting
    • Epic Life Quest
    • Iceland
    • Marketing
    • Presenting
    • Productivity
  • My Life Quest
    • Future Achievements
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos

Secret Meeting Minutes for the SQL Server on Linux Decision*

7 years ago
marketing, SQL Server
11 Comments

After today’s bombshell announcement that a subset of SQL Server functionality will run on Linux, I got curious and went dumpster diving. I hopped a flight over to Seattle, rummaged through the dumpster in Redmond, and found a shredded set of meeting notes. It took a long time to piece together, but here we go:

Manager: (raps table) “Alright, let’s call this meeting to order. We need to raise the market share of SQL Server. This is the new Microsoft, people. Anything is possible. Let’s think about the truly new and unique. What can we do?”

Rand: “People have complained about core-based pricing ever since we brought it out. Let’s switch back to socket-based pricing.”

SQL Server <3 Linux
SQL Server <3 Linux

Manager: “HAHAHA, Rand, you’re such a joker, that’s what I love about you.”

Rand: “Uh, okay, we could cut pricing?”

Manager: “Come on, Rand, quit screwing around. I’m being serious.”

Rand: “How about we do a single version, cut out the confusing Express/Standard/BI/Enterprise stuff? Just one version, all the features included, just priced based on hardware size?”

Manager: “DAMMIT, RAND, GET OUT. I don’t know why the hell we invite you to these meetings. Out. Seriously. Alright, who else has ideas?”

Carly: “Let’s put a space between Always and On. I think people haven’t been adopting Availability Groups because they can’t get AlwaysOn past the spell checker. We can fix that with a simple space, and that’ll raise adoption rates.”

Manager: “Genius! See, that’s exactly the kind of thinking we need around here! Who else?”

Jeb: “We could go through the highly-voted Connect bug reports, especially the ones around incorrect results, and – ”

Manager: “IS RAND EMAILING YOU? I swear to God, if Rand is emailing you that idea, Jeb, you’re fired.”

Jeb: “Forget it. Next idea.”

Marco: “People complain about SSMS not showing any signs of trouble. Let’s give them a newer, easy-to-use Management Studio that will actually involve management, and help them troubleshoot outages by – ”

Manager: “No, out of the question. What about cloud? People seem to love that cloud thing.”

Ted: “Sure, how about we let them log ship or mirror or AG over to Azure SQL DB? They could use the cloud as a low-cost DR option without hassling with virtual machines.”

Manager: “Hmm, I like it, but…what about replication?”

Ted: “What? No, we’ve been discouraging people from – ”

Manager: “No no, wait – one-way replication. They’ll be able to replicate their data in, but not back out. That way we’ve got ’em locked in, and they can never fail back!”

Ted: “That’s absolutely ignor – ”

Manager: “If you can get it done by November 15th, I’ll give you a good annual review.”

Ted: “I’m on it.”

Manager: “Anything else? Think, people, think.”

Donald: “We could run SQL Server on Linux.”

Manager: “I’m listening.”

Donald: “I know this guy who says he won’t run SQL Server unless it’s on Linux.”

Carly: “So he’s racist against Windows?”

Donald: “I didn’t say that. I don’t actually know. But I wouldn’t disavow him if he wants to buy a few copies of SQL Server.”

Manager: “Brilliant. Let’s devote dev resources to that.”

  • Totally not the secret meeting minutes. This is humor. But for the record, Linus won.
marketing, SQL Server
Previous Post
Epic Life Quest: Level 7 Achieved.
Next Post
The Experience of Switching from VMware to Hyper-V

11 Comments. Leave new

  • pdrsntsfrrr
    March 8, 2016 7:48 am

    Great blog post!!

    Reply
  • Brian
    March 8, 2016 8:17 am

    “Racist against Windows”

    Classic!

    Reply
    • Brent
      March 9, 2016 5:58 am

      Heh heh heh, thanks!

      Reply
  • Sergey
    March 8, 2016 9:46 am

    C’mon, it makes sense 🙂 At least you don’t buy Windows licence (assuming that SQL will work on Linux :))

    Reply
    • Brent
      March 9, 2016 5:57 am

      Windows licenses for a 4-8 core server are around $2k. The SQL Server licenses are $8k-$56k.

      Reply
  • Bob Boinette
    March 8, 2016 10:49 am

    Now we will have to reboot our Linux Servers weekly with SQL Server on it !

    Reply
    • Marcelo
      March 8, 2016 12:37 pm

      Windows servers are not rebooted because of SQL SERVER! They are rebooted because they’re Windows and we all enjoy logging on their GUI!

      Reply
    • Brent
      March 9, 2016 5:57 am

      HAHAHA

      Reply
  • philipfactor
    March 9, 2016 1:07 pm

    I heard that it was originally intended to go out on April 1st but they forgot to schedule the blog and released it early by mistake. By the time someone noticed, it was too late to pull the story.

    Reply
    • Brent
      March 10, 2016 6:59 am

      HAHAHA, I can totally believe that.

      Reply
  • ihafidh
    March 11, 2016 11:25 am

    Funny post Brent. We see your wish list for Microsoft; socket-based pricing, single version license, etc. To that, Microsoft responds, “you wish!”.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.

Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

© 2021 Brent Ozar, all rights reserved. Privacy Policy

  • Home
  • My Favorite Topics
  • My Life Quest
  • About Me
  • My Recent Photos