> You can't "just" throw a MS SQL install on a machine, it needs to be properly installed system-wide and register all its components or it won't work properly etc. — so spinning an instance up for testing really isn't nearly as easy as with postgres.

As another commenter pointed out, you can run MSSQL in Docker. We do this in CI.

You can also install it pretty easily on a standard Linux machine, without much more complexity than Postgresql. For example, you can `apt install mssql-server`

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/quickstart-instal...