Many people asked us if  the Confidential database can run on MySQL, the reason being that that most people have Linux servers and are typically running MySQL databases.

Confidential needs a Microsoft SQL Server to run, as most of its logic is written using Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures. But Microsoft comes to help: since February 2018, Microsoft SQL Server is available for several Linux distribution (at this point Ubuntu 16.04, Red Hat and Suse, but we made some tests and got it to run on Centos 7.x as well, using the Red Hat howto). We made a couple tests and within 30 mins we had a Confidential database running on an Ubuntu box, without any surprise!

How to get the Confidential database to run on a Linux box

This is how we did it:

• Downloaded a .vdi from osboxes.org (the iso has to be Ubuntu 16.04 at this point). You’ll need Virtualbox to run it
• Installed SSH server on it, in order to manage the machine via putty.
• Installed MSSQL Express, following Microsoft’s howto (takes literally 5 minutes), created sa password.
• Created Confidential database from the Confidential GUI

The whole process took around 15 minutes. We repeated the same with Centos 7.x (using the Red Hat howto) and it worked fine and looked like this:

We’re happy to share our ready-made .vdi with you, just drop us a line 🙂