This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Anthony Nocentino (@nocentino). He wants to know what we’ve been up to with containers. Perfect timing, because I have just spent the last couple of weeks learning how to develop in containers using Visual Studio Code! I was planning to write this for myself anyway, but perhaps it can be interesting for others as well 🤓
What is the use case?
One of my clients are using dbt (Data Build Tool) for their data transformations. In short, this means that developers write data transformations in SQL as SELECT statements. All SQL code can be combined with Jinja templates. Inside of these Jinja templates, developers can reference other tables, use control logic, or define common SQL code snippets as reusable macros. Dbt then compiles the SQL+Jinja code into pure SQL.
About a month ago, I learned something new. I learned how to run SQL Server 2019 in Docker and how to set up my demo environment in a container. Cool stuff! I like whales. Whales are cool.
While learning, I started writing this blog post. Then I got distracted and never finished it. This weekend, I had to set up my demo environment again. It was the perfect opportunity to update the content and finally publish this post.
(Why did I have to set up everything again? Oh, it’s a long story that involves disk cleanup and a Cathrine who likes to delete things to keep her computer tidy. Ok, it’s not really a long story. It was more like “oops, I accidentally deleted my container”.)
Anyway! Back to the actual content.
In this post, I share my approach and code snippets for:
- Installing Docker
- Getting SQL Server 2019
- Running SQL Server 2019 in a Docker Container
- Restoring Demo Databases (AdventureWorks and WideWorldImporters)
Installing Docker
I knew nothing about Docker or containers a month ago. But! I’m lucky to have smart friends 🤩 Andrew Pruski (@dbafromthecold) wrote Running SQL Server 2019 CTP in a Docker container as part of his brilliant blog post series on containers.
I decided to start with his walkthrough and do exactly what he did. It worked pretty well for me! See below 👇🏻