Buying My Own House, or Staying in a Friend’s House
This week is Thanksgiving Week. We are planning to visit our “hometown”, where we lived for past 6 years. My good friend there said that her family will be out of town and we could stay in her house during our visit. Yeah!!! Imaging the whole house with everything we need and we can use anything as our wish, I am really thankful for that.
Isn’t this similar to the virtual machine that Microsoft provides us to use in virtual labs that I mentioned in this post? It has all the apps (in old days, we call them softwares), such as SQL Server engine, SSMS and SSDS. It is fast and easy to use.
Yesterday, when I used the lab, I found the third downside of this way of using SQL server (the first two were mentioned at the end of this post):
You can not copy/paste to and from the virtual machine. That means, I can not copy the movie database scripts to the machine. Also, anything I wrote, like SQL scripts, on the machine can not being copied and used later in anywhere. Anything I write will disappear after the 2 hour session.
So, if you plan to use SQL server and learn deeply, it is wise to install it on your computer. If you just want to see what SQL server is about and play around, you can use the free virtual machine.
I’d like to take myself as an example again. I will stay in my friend’s house over this Thanksgiving weekend. But if I am going to stay in that city for another 6 years, I will buy my own house.
(note: the free way of VM is not there anymore. but I still keep this article because it reminds me of my good friends in my ‘hometown’).