>>>>Oh wow!!!!!
>>>>
>>>>I see issues almost immediately. I wonder how they will provide connections? Oh there are ODBC tools on Linux but to get Linux to connect you have use FreeTDS or unixODBC. Neither, is a walk in the park to setup and IMO not as good as MS-ODBC tools. Then of course there are the issues of replacing MySQL and PostgreSQL (both are free and are standard on all releases of Linux).
>>>>
>>>>Right now I'm of the opinion that there is little in the Linux world that beats PostgreSQL in terms of features and performance.
>>>>
>>>>All that said - I'm happy to see M$ may soon become just 'MS'.
>>>
>>>If not via ODBC, how do Linux clients talk to Linux-hosted PostgreSQL/MySQL?
>>
>>On the client side, I've used ODBC drivers on windows machines to connect to a MySQL database. I'm assuming there will be windows versions of the ODBC drivers to connect to the Linux version of SQL server.
>
>Yes, I've used Windows clients against PostgreSQL (via ODBC driver). I thought ODBC was a very successful standard and that Linux clients would use it to connect to Linux-hosted RDBMSs.
>
>In theory, if SQL Server on Linux presents the same set of services as SQL Server on Windows, there may be no changes to the Windows client ODBC drivers at all (!) i.e. use the same driver, just point to a Linux instance instead of a Windows instance.

The big question for me is...how much will it cost? Nice that you don't have to pay for another windows server - but is the SQL Server cost going to be any less?