Mini Data Lab – SQL Server 2019 on Docker Part 2

So here we are back for Part 2 (I highly recommend you read Part 1 if you haven’t yet). In this post we are going to start configuring our containers and our SQL Instances to make them a little more functional and useful. In the first post, we really just created the containers with all the default settings. That means that all the storage is going to be inside the container. If it is deleted, the storage goes with it. So instead, to make the container more robust and upgradable, we are going to map some local storage on my host machine.

Let’s first take a look at the way I have my disk/folder structure laid out. Again, this is on my personal computer so it’s not a best practice for production and more suitable for development environments.

For each container, I’m creating a separate folder with the MSSQL paths that I need to put my databases, transaction log, and backup files on. Additionally, under the DockerMount folder I have a folder called sqldockershared (which I will put some shared content in later).