SQL Server on Linux for the Business Intelligence Professional: Prerequisites

In this blog series, I’ll talk about SQL Server on Linux for the Business Intelligence Professional. You’ll need some prequisites, and this blog post edition is dedicated to helping you to get set up.

It’s assumed that you have set up a SQL Server on Linux Virtual Machine on Azure.

To connect to it, you will need an SSH client. SSH stands for Secure Shell. SSH is used to log into a remote machine and execute commands. It also supports other features, such as tunneling, forwarding TCP ports and X11 connections. It can transfer files using the associated SSH file transfer (SFTP) or secure copy (SCP) protocols. SSH uses the client-server model.

I’ve put some instructions here so you have an SSH client installed.  The options are below:

Installing an SSH Client

If you don’t have a client installed, you have a lot of options for SSH Clients. For our purposes, there are no differences although I recommend Chocolatey because it has some great package features. These choices are listed here:

  • Choose Git for Windows I will go through the examples using this client
  • Use Chocolatey. SSH is also part of Chocolatey 
  • PuTTY is featured in the Microsoft documentation

Git for Windows

You can install Git for Windows, which has an SSH client.  There are a ton of front end tools.

Chocolatey

To install it, run a command console as Administrator. To do this, type CMD in the Cortana search window, and options will come up. Right click on the Console, and select the option Run as Administrator.
Copy and Paste the following command, taken from the Chocolatey Site:
@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
You can also install the Chocolatey GUI.  The command to do this is as follows, again, credit to the Chocolatey team over at the website itself:

choco install chocolateygui
You can use PuTTY, as Microsoft Books online show. I like using Git Windows simply because my customers usually have it installed already, and it’s not an extra step to install it. SSH is part of the Git for Windows bundle so you probably already have it.
When your SSH client is installed, then you can connect to your SQL Server Linux machine. I will cover this item in the next post.

3 thoughts on “SQL Server on Linux for the Business Intelligence Professional: Prerequisites

Leave a Reply