In the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity of working on a new project which needed me to be familiar with MSSql Server — using T/SQL and the usual SQL. So, as you might have guessed, the first step was to install MSsql server on my MacOS and interesting enough this is currently not available for on Mac.
Alright 🤔, what do I do? Yep! you guessed right. Googled it, and I will like to share what I learned Googling with you here😃.
Installation
Prerequisites
- Docker Installation. See Install Docker for updated steps.
- Minimum of 2GB of disk space
- Minimum of 2GB of RAM
Cool, now you have met the prerequisites lets now pull the Microsoft SQL server image from Docker registry.
Step 1: Launch a Terminal on your MacOS.
Step 2: Pull Microsoft SQL Server image using below command
Step 3: Run the pull-ed docker image using
The following table provides a description of the arguments in the above docker run command.
At this point, we now have MS-SQL Server up and running, so let's upload data and run some queries.
Load Data
MS-SQL is a Database Management System, so we will need to create a database, upload data and run a few queries.
Data which we will be uploading is an extract of the Consumer Complaint dataset. This is available from here.
But before we do this, let's connect to our container and download this data to a directory.
The below table describes these commands
I am sure a few curious minds are asking
Can pulling the MS-SQL Server image, setting environment variables and downloading test data be done with docker? The answer is a resounding YES.
This is demonstrated in the Dockerfile below
Now we have our demo data lets upload using the following steps
- Connect to MS-SQL container. To achieve this I recommend downloading and using Azure Data Studio. This is a stripped down version of SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).
- Run below command
Run Queries
Now we have a dataset, let's run a few queries.
Resources
- Learn Enough Docker to be Useful Part 1, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four
- Run SQL Server container images with Docker
- Azure Data Studio
- SQL & Database Design A-Z Udemy Course
