“Then we wait ten minutes per build,” Marcus shrugged.
LocalDB . The quiet cousin of SQL Server. It wasn’t a service. It wasn’t a full instance. It was a mssqllocaldb
The new hire’s jaw dropped.
Lena paused. “Containers are great. But LocalDB is lighter. It starts in milliseconds. It doesn’t require pulling images. It’s already on every Windows developer’s machine, installed by Visual Studio. And it has one superpower containers don’t.” “Then we wait ten minutes per build,” Marcus shrugged
The fix was simple: set the environment variable LOCALAPPDATA to a short path before starting the instance. Lena added it to the pipeline script and never saw the error again. mssqllocaldb