with our partners and the community, including Red Hat OpenShift, Docker Swarm, and Mesosphere DC/OS.Financial technology startup cuts database management time by 90 percentCustomers are already adopting SQL Server in containers. dv01 is a Wall Street startup, offering a reporting and analytics platform to institutional investors interested in greater insight into consumer lending markets. dv01 had initially based its solution on PostgreSQL and Amazon Redshift, but moved to SQL Server 2016 in Windows Azure Virtual Machines for faster query response times and scalability as its data grew. Because the firm runs all its other workloads on Linux, dv01 signed up for the Early Adoption Program for SQL Server 2017 to get Microsoft advice and assistance on migrating its solution to SQL Server on Linux. This move will help the company avoid managing multiple operating systems within its environment. It opted to deploy the application to production on Docker Engine, using a SQL Server 2017 on Linux image. Its choice to implement SQL Server and Docker containers has cut database management time by 90 percent, freeing its development team to focus on adding new capabilities to the product. To learn more about dv01s SQL Server 2017 journey, you can read its story here.SQL Server 2016 offered the combination of performance and scalability that we needed, said Dean Chen, VP of Engineering, dv01. Expensive queries that were taking 30 seconds or more with our previous system now take 1-2 seconds, which means were able to do analytics queries in close to real time for our users.Making SQL Server on a Linux Docker container easyWith SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.1, available today, we continue to add to the manageability features for SQL Server on Linux Docker containers. We have introduced the ability to configure the SQL Server configuration settings through environment variables passed as parameters to docker run. This enables some of the most common SQL Server configuration scenarios in Docker containers, such as setting the server collation when creating a new SQL Server instance in a container. If youd like to learn more about the SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.1 release, read our detailed blog for information on the other enhancements and how to get started with the preview.We want to make it as easy as possible to get started with this technology. If youd like to learn about how to get started with building a data-centric CI/CD pipeline using SQL Server on Linux containers, join SQL Server engineers Travis Wright and Tobias Ternstrom for this how-to video from the Microsoft Build event for developers.Reasons to consider running SQL Server in containersIn many ways, container technology is at an inflection point much like hypervisors were 15 years ago. The benefits are immense and increasing every day and include the following:Reduced size on disk for better hardware utilizationReduced CPU/memory consumption, which also results in better hardware utilizationReduced deployment size for faster deployments and scale up/downReduced patching for less effort, less vulnerability, less down timeBetter composability using layers of Images, applications defined as multiple containersEasier sharing with Docker Hub and RegistryBut in some cases, there are