One of the new phrases coming out of Microsoft is that “SQL is just SQL” regardless of what operating system it resides on. This was echoed during the keynote at SQL Bits 2019 by the Microsoft team, which you can watch here. Later that weekend, I gave a session about database internals. My presentation is about how data is structured within a row and why that matters. Understanding the internals of table structures, even in today’s age of technology, include SQL Server 2019 (which will be released in Q3/Q4 of 2019) is important. During my session, a question came up about how a data page is structured if SQL Server is sitting on top of a Linux server, such as Ubuntu. Does the data page have the same size and shape in Linux as it does in Windows?