February 7, 2017 at 6:12 am
.. Finally we get to cost. Linux gets adopted a lot because it’s free. I looked on Azure at the time I wrote this and a D15 v2 instance with 20 cores and 140Gib of RAM was $1.49 an hour with Linux. If you switch to Windows, the same configuration costs $2.43 an hour. That’s about an $8200 per year “tax” for running Windows on a server we might use for hosting SQL Server. Not a huge number compared to the SQL license cost, but not nothing either. All things being equal (and clearly that’s not yet the case for SQL Server on Linux) the cheaper one wins. ..
From a personal computing perspective, I have a preference for Windows, and I would gladly pay the $50 Windows tax when purchasing my next PC. However, from the perspective of a database administrator, I don't really have strong feelings about Windows Server versus Linux Server, because when everything is setup and working as needed, I don't really interact with the server OS. If Microsoft wants customers to run their cloud hosted databases on Windows, it needs to continue migrating and promoting the full Microsoft ecosystem (SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, PowerShell, Active Directory, HDInisght, Visual Studio, etc.) to the cloud. It's these business applications that form the grand columns of Microsoft and justify the additional premium; the Windows operating system itself is just the solid foundation that they sit upon.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
February 7, 2017 at 6:19 am
Andy Warren - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 5:31 AMAlex, on those security holes, do you think that having open source makes a product more vulnerable to day zero or day 10 vulnerabilities being found and exploited than closed source? That seems like an interesting thing to do dig into!
Well Andy, lets take the recent Dirty Cow bug as an example. It was present in the code for 9 years, and no one noticed it, so these things are not easy to notice no matter which development model you use. But once it was discovered it was fixed PDQ, and a lot of noise made about the need to patch your systems if you were vulnerable. Compared to the way some commercial companies just slip it in to the next update/security patch without ever revealing the details, leaving users uninformed and unaware of the threat, so that users/admin's may delay updates and leave a lot more systems insecure.
The requirements for transparency and good communication amongst FOSS developers and users engenders trust, this contrasts with the need to retain trust in the closed source model by not revealing known bugs. Some people may like being kept ignorant and happy by the purveyors of closed source software, I don't
February 7, 2017 at 6:24 am
There's more to Linux and OSS than monetary "free". There's choice and flexibility that's hard to find in the Windows realm.
I can choose to run a variety of distributions on a variety of hardware, choose exactly what is installed and how much admin I want to do. I can choose when and how I upgrade any software and do so with either a application or from the CLI. Depending on my needs I can run either on the cloud, a laptop, a workstation, supercomputer or an Raspberry Pi. I can fully configure an Linux workstation from scratch in less time than Windows. Same hardware, tested multiple times. (You can enhance the process for any OS by either by scripting or using a VM, but for a initial load, it's night and day.) I can run a wireless/PBX at a remote site powered by solar and not spend a dime on licensing.
That being said, there's strengths to Windows and it's environment. It's known entity with well defined boundaries that helps in the business world. There's applications like Office, that still can't be fully match by the OSS realm. There's applications that are only available on Windows. It's hard to find the level of polish and documentation in other databases that exists for SQL Server.
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February 7, 2017 at 6:25 am
Alex, that's a great example. I agree security bugs are tough to find, open source or not.
February 7, 2017 at 6:27 am
Andy Warren - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 5:34 AMAll, good discussion so far, but it seems to focus on personal use (and personal choice!). But what about for servers, do the same reasons apply or is it mostly about cost, or cost first, then other considerations?
See my comments on Steve's SQL Server on Linux discussion, I see very little point in paying for just the engine on one Linux box and all the other tools on a Windows machine, you end up paying twice, unless you license the whole physical machine and then scale out over VMs. Linux has its own native enterprise level Databases engines which integrate much better. So I like SQL Server on Windows, and what you run a website or file server on is up to everyone else, there it comes down to the options of which technology you want to use and are comfortable with.
February 7, 2017 at 8:34 am
You never worry about OS until you have performance problems. From my perspective as sysadmin, it has always been easier to tweak Linux and configure it to use the hardware to its maximum capacity than Windows. Running SQL Server on Linux is just one step of the many steps needed for SQL Server to take advantage of Linux, so now SQL Server will perform better on Window than on Linux.
February 7, 2017 at 10:45 am
It has been said above very well, Linux is Free as in freedom. I need no one's "permission" to make whatever changes I wish or to modify or tweak to my heart's content. It is "my" OS as long as I don't try to resell it downstream.
Also, it is a different philosophy. Linux is designed by geeks from the get go to be a set of tools for you to use as far as your imagination will allow. The developers don't assume that the end user is an idiot who needs wizards and talking paper clips to do simple tasks, Linux respects its user, but extra tools are provided for those who need the help.
Windows has always felt more like a commodity, a "product" in and of its self. The OS should be the foundation, something that can be as simple or as overblown as desired. It's job is to enable me to run OTHER things to get things done. Windows is what a group of usability designers in Redmond THINKS I want it to be. Linux is what I want it to be.
Microsoft is making great strides to change it's approach to the OS and I commend them for that, but Linux will always just feel more like home because that respect and ownership vibe was in its DNA from that very first kernel release. It is MY OS, not something that I have been given "permission" to use on a computer.
February 7, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Perhaps the operating system debate is just a needless distraction. Expanding on the existing SQLOS subsystem, the SQL Server database engine could theoretically run on bare metal and do all of the networking, thread management, disk I/O, virtualization, etc. itself. Of course, IIS, SSIS, SQLAgent, etc. would all need to run on dedicated application servers.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
February 7, 2017 at 1:57 pm
I spent 10 years working on Unix systems and with the utilities available, working in the shell is powerful. True, Unix isn't free, but Unix skills are transferrable to Linux systems. For a number of years, I had a Sun SPARCStation at home that ran Solaris until the hard drive crashed (I suppose I could find SCSI drives on EBay). While I had the Unix system, my primary computer ran Windows and I installed Apache on it as a proxy server so the Unix system could access the internet.
I've been developing Windows systems for over 15 years and Windows has been the primary system at home. But I think it pays to retain skills. At work, I had to migrate data from Windows Active Directory to an Excel CSV file and awk was the quickest way to read the LDIF file and create a CSV file.
I bought Solaris 7 from Sun when they had pricing for hobbyists. I've also had Linux systems at home.
February 8, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Alex Gay - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 2:31 AMdavid.leyden - Monday, February 6, 2017 10:16 PMThe reason I love Linux is because it is free. But it isn't free as in free beer. It is free as in free speech.This is a big reason to like Linux. The freedom to do what you want and make a system that does as much, or as little, as you want.
To counter the argument on price, if the price is uninportant and peole care more about features and functionality why do Apple machines make up such a small percent of the market? They certainly have the cool factor, they look gourgeous, and a lot of Linux users choose to use Apple hardware. The reason that these people reject the Apple ecosystem is the same reason they reject the Windows one. It is a walled garden over which you have no control, the owner of the software can change anything, at anytime, and break your existing programms, or invalidate your hardware, forcing you to upgrade some aspect of your computing experiance that you are perfectly happy with. If someone else can control what you do on your computer and how you do it, then that computer is not yours, you are not free, you are living in electronic fudalism.
Linux makes my computer free for me to use it how i like. I can be as secure, or insecure as I wish. I can use older versions of software, either because I am used to them or don't need new er features, no one will force me to upgrade. It gives me freedom from the upgrade treadmill, I don't have to buy a new device because the manufacturer wants to sell more product.
Linux is freedon from slavery, not freedom from financial cost, that is why people love it.
I don't know anyone who rejects Apple for those reasons, they all reject the cost. Further, are you aware that the Apple OS is Linux? I can do exactly the same things on Apple that I can do on Linux, however Apple does provide extensions that are of course not available in Linux.
Linux is great for the reasons you mention, among others, nobody can control what you do. Linux works, without the need to watch ads from MS, without the need to throw dozens of gigabytes of memory on the machine, and dozens of processors, just to run a database.
Dave
February 9, 2017 at 2:36 am
I don't care about the cost or Windows/Linux, I care about ease of use. Ease of use can negate a cost disadvantage, awkwardness can eliminate a cost advantage. I'm not sure that many people will be able to quantify a point of superiority for one over the other that would stand up to scrutiny. It's like listening to teenage boys arguing about the merits of a Ferarri over a Lamborghini when they've yet to pass their driving test.
Open-source simply means that you can, if you so wish, look at the source code. It is not
There are some brilliant pieces of open-source software and similarly there are some syphilitic turds
There are some zero cost community packages and some eye wateringly expensive packages for enterprise.
Where you have a popular open-source product the chances are that enough people are using it to thrash out the vulnerabilities.
I knew someone who opined that the thing you got most of with expensive software was bugs because there were few companies that could afford specialist software therefore few users pushing the boundaries of that software.
With any open-source package that you are proposing to use it is worth taking a look at it's release history.
Rapidly escalating version numbers can be an indicator of market interest in that package.
Slowly escalating version numbers can indicate lack of market interest or indicate maturity.
These are guidelines only. There are no hard and fast rules. For example Apache Pig is only at version 0.16. It hasn't achieved version one yet but is widely used in the Hadoop ecosystem.
February 9, 2017 at 2:53 am
MacOSX is based on the NeXT OS with micro kernel components taken from BSD and other modules from the FreeBSD project, not the Linux kernel, but this is very low level stuff and makes no difference from a user perspective as both Linux and BSD are POSIX compliant and many skills are transferable between the two. There are differences in licensing as well, and if MacOS was based on Linux Apple would have to make their source code available under the terms of the GPL. The BSD kernel was also older and more stable at the time they started to develop MacOS, it also has a more permissive licence.
I do agree that it is nice to be able to run a database server on much cheaper hardware than MS, but as long as "No one was ever fired for buying MS", to coin a phrase, we will remain employable.
February 9, 2017 at 6:49 am
An operating system is to a database server what a buyer/seller agent, attorney, and county clerk are to a real-estate purchase. It's entirely reasonable to ask what the middle men bring to the transaction in terms of financial, administrative, and performance overhead. Like I mentioned before, there is nothing essential that the operating system provides for the database that the database engine couldn't theoretically provide for itself better if it were extended to include that low level functionality.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
February 9, 2017 at 8:09 am
Eric M Russell - Thursday, February 9, 2017 6:49 AMAn operating system is to a database server what a buyer/seller agent, attorney, and county clerk are to a real-estate purchase. It's entirely reasonable to ask what the middle men bring to the transaction in terms of financial, administrative, and performance overhead. Like I mentioned before, there is nothing essential that the operating system provides for the database that the database engine couldn't theoretically provide for itself better if it were extended to include that low level functionality.
Didn't Oracle try that in the 90s? Didn't they call it something like Raw Iron?
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
February 9, 2017 at 8:24 am
I grew up on Unix (FreeBSD 4 Life). It was the first real OS I dived into and started learning how to code with text-based games that were available via AOL Dial-up.
I work a lot with Windows today because of SQL Server. I think I would still choose Linux even if Windows was free for projects if I had the choice. This is because of the freedom I have with the system. I've heard people mention that open source does not equate to quality and so on. This is very true, but as engineers, control and insight is pretty critical. Having more control and more insight can lead to better output for some. For others, especially those who are so dependant on GUI, autocompletes and other systems that help mitigate your mistakes or failure to understand, having too much control and insight does lead to confusion and not knowing where to go. It becomes very frustrating.
Outside of that, having the power to add and remove services is amazing in Linux. So many open source solutions you can install very fluently and also have the same control. You need a web service? You have so many options. You need a mail server? Got your covered. I really do love being on Linux and for most of those Linux guys, they really feel at home at the command prompt and the idea they can take their OS anywhere without limitation.
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