Install SQL Server 15.x on Ubuntu Linux Server 18.04 LTS

Published in

accellware

5 min readOct 23, 2019

Introduction

Back in 2017 microsoft brought its owned RDBMS to the linux world.

In this article I’ll get you through the process of installing SQL Server on Ubuntu 18.04. There are a lot of articles on the internet on how to install on this famous operating system, but my article would help you save tremendous time trying to debug installation failures.

Let’s jump into action.

System Requirements

The following table shows the minimum requirements to install SQL Server for linux (Please make sure you have this config in your VM or Server otherwise sql server won’t install):

Installation

1. Prepare the machine

Run the following commands to update your machine:

sudo apt-get update

Then:

sudo apt-get upgrade

2. Install libcurl3 instead of libcurl4

Up until this post is writen, SQL server for linux doesn’t support libcurl4. So we need to downgrade libcurl to version:

Uninstall libcurl4 using this command:

sudo apt-get remove libcurl4

Then install libcurl3 using this command:

sudo apt-get install libcurl3

The console output should show a message like this showing it was successfully installed:

3. Install SQL Server

Now we need to proceed with the normal installation process as indicated in Microsoft official documentation:

1. Import the public repository GPG keys:

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

2. Register the Microsoft SQL Server Ubuntu repository for SQL Server 2019 preview:

sudo add-apt-repository "$(wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-preview.list)"

3. Run the following commands to install SQL Server:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server

We stop right after installing the package so we make some config changes then we continue.

OpenSSL libraries 1.0 config

Here are the steps to configure SQL Server to work properly with OpenSSL 1.0:

Stop SQL Server running the following command

sudo systemctl stop mssql-server

2. Edit Sql Server service configuration with this command

sudo systemctl edit mssql-server

3. In the editor that will open, add the following lines:

[Service]
Environment="LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/mssql/lib"

If you are not familiar with nano editor, you have to paste the above lines then make the following commands equentially:

1. CTRL + O
2. Enter
3. CTRL + X

4. Create symbolic links to OpenSSL 1.0 for SQL Server to use

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0 /opt/mssql/lib/libssl.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /opt/mssql/lib/libcrypto.so

5. Start SQL Server

sudo systemctl start mssql-server

Continue installation of SQL Server

Now it’s time for the last step, in this step the command line prompts us to input the edition we want to install, accept licence agreement and then setup SA admin password.

sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup

If setup couldn’t successfuly run sql server, execute the following command:

sudo systemctl start mssql-server

Check status

sudo systemctl status mssql-server

It should display a message that resembles to

Hooray, congrats on making it to this point!!!

Bonus: Connect to SQL Server instance

From Linux

To connect from linux you have to install sql server client package

1. You need first to install curl

sudo apt install curl

2. Import the public repository GPG keys.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

3. Register the Microsoft Ubuntu repository.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/msprod.list

4. Update the sources list and run the installation command with the unixODBC developer package.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mssql-tools unixodbc-dev

You will be prompted to accept licences with a linux command line GUI, just accept each time you are prompted.

5. Add mssql-tools to your PATH

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc

5. Connect

sqlcmd -S <ServerAddress> -U SA -P '<YourPassword>'

If you experience issues you will have to indicate the protocol and port in the server address.

Also if you would not like to have your password to appear in bash history or your cli prompt, you do not have to specify -P parameter, the tool will prompt you later to input a password.

Example:

sqlcmd -S tcp:127.0.0.1,1433 -U SA

From external: Allow port 1433

Before you proceed to login from outside our server we need to make sure the default TCP port 1433 or changed one is allowed to accept inbound traffic.

If you are on azure, you have to go to your virtual machine -> Networking, click on Add inbound port rule button.