SQL Server Components and Features by OS

SQL Server 2017 became available in Sept. 2017 and is available on Windows and Linux. The full feature set is available on Windows and most of the database management features are available on Linux. The chart highlights components and key features that the Linux version does not include, although they are expected to be available in future releases. (For more details, see the release notes for SQL Server on Linux at https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-release-notes#Unsupported.)

SQL Server on Linux is not a shimmed or virtual implementation of SQL Server for Windows running on Linux, but rather it is the core product running natively on a Linux distribution. This is possible because SQL Server runs on a platform abstraction layer, called SQLPAL, which communicates between the core SQL Server product and the underlying OS. The abstraction layer was expanded to work with Linux, which means a release of SQL Server on Linux is the same software delivered to Windows.

The abstraction layer changes helped the team move quickly in bringing the product to Linux; however, the Linux OS is different than Windows, and there have been some modifications and additions to the product to accommodate OS-specific characteristics. For example, file path structures are different, and failover features require extra Linux components to work properly. The team’s goal is to ultimately have a single release of SQL Server with all features supported across both OSs.