Digital Ocean MSSQL can be set up without any extra effort with Bobcares by your side. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Digital Ocean Services.

Let’s take a look at how our DO Support Team is ready to help customers with Digital Ocean MSSQL.

All About Digital Ocean MSSQL

Are you looking for a way to run MS SQL Server on a Digital Ocean droplet? You are in luck. Our DO Support Techs have put together this guide to help out our readers.

Before we begin, let’s create a new droplet via the DigitalOcean dashboard. In this scenario, our experts suggest selecting Ubuntu version 16.04.06. Another prerequisite of setting up Digital Ocean MSSQL is a 4 GB server size at a minimum.

Additionally, it is a good idea to select the data center where we host our applications. This helps reduce latency as well as bandwidth costs. Moreover, we are going to stick to SSH authentication during Droplet creation since DigitalOcean prefers it over password authentication as SSH offers better security.

How to generate an SSH key

We can generate an SSH key by opening a new terminal and running the ssh-keygen command. This will prompt the key location. We can either proceed with the default or specify another location. Once we enter the location, we must enter a password to secure the key. The next step involves verifying the existence of the key.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

At this point, we can copy the results of the new key and use it while creating a new Droplet.

How to connect to the server

After creating the droplet, it is time to connect to the server. We can use the following command if the SSH key is at the default location:

ssh root@ip.address

However, if the SSH key is at another location :

ssh root@ip.address -i

If everything is in order, we will be connected to the new server.

How to install Digital Ocean MSSQL

1. Enter superuser mode with the command:

   sudo su
2. To begin with, we have to import the public repository GPG keys with the following command:

   curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | apt-key add -
3. Next, add the Digital Ocean MSSQL Server Ubuntu repository as seen below:

   sudo add-apt-repository "$(wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-2017.list)"
4. Then, exit the superuser mode with the command exit.
5. After that, it is time to install the Digital Ocean MSSQL server:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server
6. Then, run this command to set up the configuration:

   sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup
7. Finally, run mssql-conf setup as seen below to check the status of the installation:

   systemctl status mssql-server

After installing Digital Ocean MSSQL, we can choose to install Digital Ocean MSSQL tools as well. This involves importing more GPG keys:

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Then, we have to add the list of packages to apt as seen below:

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/msprod.list

Once we update the package lists as seen here:

sudo apt-get update

After that, we can install the tools with this command:

sudo apt-get install mssql-tools unixodbc-dev

Now, we can connect to the server with the password from the setup:

sqlcmd -S localhost -U SA -P ''

Although the droplet has a firewall, we can prefer to set up one on Ubuntu as well. However, our Support Techs would like to point out that is not a good idea to run the droplet and Ubuntu firewall at the same time.

If you run into any trouble with installing Digital Ocean MSSQL, drop us a line. Our support team will get you on track in no time.

[Need assistance with a different issue? We are available 24/7.]

Conclusion

In a nutshell, our skilled DO Support Engineers at Bobcares took us through Digital Ocean MSSQL.