This is just a quick one and if it helps you, that’s great!

I was asked for a little help in connecting to SQL Server running in a Docker windows container on Windows 10. Here’s the steps. Note: I’m assuming you already have Docker for Windows installed and have switched to Windows Server containers.

  1. Pull the image from the Docker repository
docker pull microsoft/sql-server-windows
  1. Start a container instance
docker run -d -p 1433:1433 -e sa_password={my password} -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y --name sql microsoft/mssql-server-windows

If you want persistence of data in your container you’ll need to mount a volume. Here’s the variation for that

docker volume create sql-data 
REM ^^^ You only need to do this once ^^^

docker run -d -p 1433:1433 --name sql -v sql-data:C:/temp/ -e attach_dbs="[{'dbName':'MyDb','dbFiles':['C:\\temp\\mydb.mdf','C:\\temp\\mydb_log. ldf']}]" -e sa_password={my password} -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y microsoft/mssql-server-windows

Be aware of one thing with regards to ports, if port 1433 is in use locally (maybe becuase you’re also running a local SQL server instance) you might need to use a different host port number. For example -p 11433:1433

  1. Check that it works

Let’s run sqlcmd directly on the container.

docker exec -it sql sqlcmd

You should launch directly into the SQL Command Line utility and be able to see your user information

1> print Suser_Sname()
2> GO
User Manager\ContainerAdministrator
  1. Connect from your desktop

On Windows 10, you can’t just connect to windows containers via localhost. You’ll need to know the ip address that the container is listening on. In a future O/S update this should be fixed, but for now a design restriction with networking and hyper-v prevents it working properly.

For now do this:

docker inspect --format '{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}' sql

This will tell you the IP address the container is listening on.

Now open SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio or SqlCmd

Here’s what you should see (using SqlCmd):

c:\pd>sqlcmd -U sa -S 172.28.129.7
Password:
1> print Suser_Sname()
2> GO
sa
1>

Note that we’re operating under a different account since we logged in from externally.

Sweet! That’s it. Nice and simple.