Once we have our prerequisites completed, we can setup our SQL Server. This will allow us to connect, view and query our database. Next, we install the SQL Server extension for VS Code. In our scenario, Docker enables us to run the Linux version of SQL Server in a Linux container on our Mac. If you haven’t heard of Docker before, it allows OS level virtualisation allowing you to run services inside lightweight containers on any operating system. Prerequisities Dockerįirstly, we’ll need to install Docker.
In this post we’ll go through how to get SQL Server running on a Mac and how we can use VS Code extensions to view and interact with the database.
However, with the advent of Docker and some VS Code extensions, we can develop and test against SQL Server, giving us more confidence our apps will work once deployed to production. Another option could be to use SQLite when in development, as this is supported on a Mac, but then you risk having unforeseen problems when deploying to production as the two databases are not equivalent. The options are then to either target a remote database, either on-prem or cloud, which quickly becomes expensive and pushes out the inner loop development time. This is not the case when developing on a Mac as LocalDB or SQL Server full are not available natively. Developing and testing web apps that target Microsoft SQL Server are a breeze on Windows because you can leverage SQL Server Express LocalDB.
