SQL

Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now runs successfully on Docker Desktop for macOS without needing OrbStack.

Update (February 2, 2026): Microsoft has fixed this issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now runs successfully on Docker Desktop for macOS without needing OrbStack. See my follow-up post for details.

SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS Tahoe 26, you might have hit a wall trying to get it running. Here’s what happened when I tried spinning up the latest container image and how I worked around it.

Update for SQL Server 2025:
This post and the GitHub repo have been updated for SQL Server 2025 RC1 and Ubuntu 24.04.
New in SQL Server 2025: You no longer need to install the PolyBase service to interact with Parquet files in S3. Previously, with SQL Server 2022, you had to build a custom container or manually install PolyBase. Now, S3 object integration and Parquet support work out-of-the-box!

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In this blog post, I’ve implemented two example environments for using SQL Server’s S3 object integration. One for backup and restore to S3-compatible object storage and the other for data virtualization using PolyBase connectivity to S3-compatible object storage. This work aims to get you up and running as quickly as possible to work with these new features. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you. The complete code for this is available on my GitHub repo. I’m walking you through the implementation here in this post.

Introduction

Purity is the operating environment that runs Pure Storage products like FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Starting in Purity 6.0, you can assign tags to objects. This post shows you how to perform some basic tagging operations for volumes.

What’s a Tag and Why Do I Care?

A tag is a key/value pair that can be attached to an object in FlashArray, like a volume or a snapshot. Using tags enables you to attach additional metadata to objects for classification, sorting, and searching. For example, you can assign a tag to a collection of volumes and then come along later and retrieve a listing of volumes that match a particular key or value. You can use tags to add application context to resources inside FlashArray. Specifically, in the examples in this blog post, I want to tag volumes with the names SQL Server Instances.

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima.

Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS. Your containers will run inside this virtual machine.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit. PASS Data Community Summit 2022 is the year’s largest gathering of data platform professionals in the US. This year I have a pre-conference workshop, a regular session, and a Learning Path session. Let’s dive into each.

Pre-Conference Workshop: Become a Hybrid Architect

My good friend Ben E. Weissman and I will teach a pre-conference workshop called “Become a Hybrid Architect” in this workshop we will cover the foundations needed to design and build a hybrid cloud strategy for your organization.

Introduction

In this post, I will walk you through how to set up MinIO, so you can use it to work with SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integrations. Working with s3 and SQL Server requires a valid and trusted TLS certificate. This can be a pain for some users and environments. So I’m writing this post so you can get off the ground running with this new feature set in SQL Server 2022. The certificate we’re working with here is self-signed. You could get a real certificate for your environment, and that’s encouraged. But this walk-through intends to get you up and running fast so that you can test out SQL Server’s s3 object integrations. We’re using MinIO’s free GNU AGPL v3 edition and running it in a docker container for our s3 compatible object storage and SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.0, which is also running in a container.

Introducing S3 in SQL Server 2022

S3 compatible object storage integration is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2022. There are two significant areas where SQL Server leverages this: backup and restore and data virtualization. This article will focus on getting started with using S3 compatible object storage for backups. Now let’s unpack that phrase ‘S3 compatible object storage’ a bit. AWS Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3) is a storage service AWS provides in their cloud. That platform’s REST API is available for others, including my company, Pure Storage, to build their own s3 compatible object storage platforms. And on at Pure Storage we have s3 available on our scale-out File and Object Platform FlashBlade. This means you can take advantage of s3 object storage anywhere you like, outside AWS’s cloud infrastructure.

Background

If you’ve been using Availability Groups, you’re familiar with the replica seeding (sometimes called initializing, preparing or data sychronization) process. Seeding is a size of data operation, copying data from a primary replica to one or more secondary replicas. This is required before joining a database to an Availability Group. You can seed a replica with backup and restore or automatic seeding, each with its own challenges. Regardless of which method you use, the seeding operation can take a long amount of time. The time it takes to seed a replica is based on the size of the database, the speed of the network, and storage. If you have multiple replicas seeding all of them is N times the fun!

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLBits! I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at SQLBits in the past, both in person and virtual, and experienced first hand how great this event is and cannot wait to get back and speak again (in person)! And this year, I have several sessions with some of my best friends on our data community!!! One on building and deploying container based applications in Kubernetes and the other on deploying SQL Server in Kubernetes