Container Development Work

Voice of the DBA

On my new laptop, I only use containers as database servers. I made the decision not to install SQL Server or PostgreSQL and instead work on containers only. I've written lightly about this, but I set up docker-compose files to load different instances of SQL Server and PostgreSQL (and others) and batch files to start and stop them. I've also set dedicated places on my disk where I can drop backup files and access them from the host.

It's 2024. I moved to containers on my laptop exclusively for databases for the first time this year. This is despite the fact that I like containers, am comfortable with them, and find them handy. Moving from installed database server software to containers took a conscious effort, and it took time to configure everything. Really, it took me a bit of time to think about how I'd want to configure my system so that my work in SSMS went smoothly.

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