See the basics of how to automate database builds into a Linux SQL Server container running on Windows and then back up the containerized database and restore it into dedicated containerized development copies for each developer and tester.
An obvious use for Docker images of SQL Server is to run up a working database from a backup quickly, maybe to test it or possibly to mask the data. We’ll start by doing that in this article. We’ll then use SQL Change Automation (SCA) to synchronize an empty copy of a development database in a Docker container with the latest build in source control and fill it with data ready for testing. Finally, we’ll do a backup of the containerized database so we can restore it into each developer’s local container. These techniques, combined with ‘glue scripts,’ can be used for supporting continuous delivery of databases.
