SQL Server Linux Container Images Got Smaller: Image Size and Startup Time Across Cumulative Updates
This week I was at PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle, and I attended a session called “An Inside Look at How Microsoft Builds SQL Features, by Bob Ward, Naveen Prakash, and Travis Wright, all of whom are on the SQL Server team. In this session, Travis mentioned that they reduced the SQL Server container image size by a meaningful amount using AI agents that helped discover unused code in the image, but details on how much and when were lost when the conversation moved on to the next topic. So I set out to find out exactly which SQL Server build this came out in, and I also wanted to measure how much we saved. They also mentioned that startup times were better now.