Think of it as diesel or gasoline power for your car. The main thing here is that Intel’s x86 architecture is CISC-based, whereas Apple’s ARM-based architecture is RISC-based. The CPU is either classified as RISC (reduced instruction set computing) or CISC (complex instruction set computing). There are two main schools of thought in CPU architecture, going back to the origins of what we know as modern computing. The long answer follows, even though I must reiterate that as of this writing, there is no way to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon inside macOS. Even Azure SQL Database Edge is a little flaky. I tried with several emulation tools, and it just isn’t possible. If you were hoping for better news, I’m sorry. What we want is to be able to run the SQL Server 2019 Docker container on our M1 Macs, the same way we did it before. The reality is that it won’t run at all. No 1 I have not yet figured out a way with Windows 11 Insider on ARM64, but even if I do, it is NOT SUPPORTED!. So, does SQL Server work on Apple Silicon? While this isn’t a bad idea if you just want to play with the database engine, this is not a fully-featured SQL Server environment and several features are missing.

The closest and recommended way to run some form of the SQL Server database engine on macOS is to use a Docker image of Azure SQL Database Edge instead. For it to run on ARM processors, it would have to be recompiled to run on that instruction set. The main thing here is that SQL Server is compiled for the x86-64 instruction set. Unfortunately, since the release of Apple’s new ARM-based M1 CPUs, there is no possible way to run SQL Server 2017 or 2019 in a Docker container, because there is no ARM-based image from Microsoft. These Docker containers were also compatible with Intel-based Macs because they were compiled on the same architecture. Then SQL Server 2017 - and later SQL Server 2019 - were made available as Docker images, thanks to the newly-introduced Linux support in SQL Server 2017. Prior to 2017, the only way to get SQL Server running on a Mac was through a virtual machine running some version of Windows that supported some version of SQL Server.

Run sql server on mac docker