Creating a SQL Server database in Azure Data Studio (MAC) - sql

Question

I'm studying a course about database management based on the Transact-SQL language. The first problem I founded was in my OS because I'm using a MAC. I had to create a SQL container in Docker and create a connection using Azure Data Studio, where I have my server, but my problem (where I'm blocked) is this:
when I have to create the FILENAME for this database I don't know where is it the directory which I have to save the .mdf and .ldf files because I'm running my server from a 'virtual' location which is not in my computer system.
How can I solve this?
Because I know nothing about containers, is the first time using Docker or similar...
I already tried to do it in a virtual machine running windows but is too much slow so I have discarded that option at the moment and I have to use SQL Server because is the language used in the course, I don't have any other option.

Answer 1

On a default Docker container (which you can check with EXEC master..sp_helpfile;), database files get created in:
/var/opt/mssql/data/
So you can say:
CREATE DATABASE floob
ON
(
NAME = N'floob_data',
FILENAME = N'/var/opt/mssql/data/floob.mdf'
)
LOG ON
(
NAME = N'floob_log',
FILENAME = N'/var/opt/mssql/data/floob.ldf'
);
This is the bare minimum set of properties you need in order to dictate the location of the files; it will take other properties (like size/growth) from model.
But unless the course materials dictate that your CREATE DATABASE command absolutely must include FILENAME parameters, you can generally leave them out when building some skunkworks stuff on your own machine, as they will be placed in the default location that you don't really need to know (until that drive fills up).
In production that's generally not the best idea, though, because we often want to customize size, growth, separate data from log, etc.