Top 5 SQL Server 2012 FeaturesAlwaysOn Quite simply, SQL Server 2012 is going to revolutionize the way we think about availability and recovery. Today, when we think about these concepts, we consider an individual database (log shipping, replication, mirroring) or an entire SQL Server instance (failover clustering). In SQL Server 2012, in addition to Failover Clustering enhancements, we’ll be able to treat a group of databases as an entity – a much more common requirement with today’s complex, multi-database applications. This entity is called an Availability Group. Availability Groups will allow us to fail over that group of databases as a single unit. Since a single instance of SQL Server will be able to host multiple availability groups, in the event of a failure, we’ll have the flexibility to fail over one availability group to instance B, another availability group to instance C, and so on. This means that we don’t have to have a standby server that is capable of handling the full load of our primary server – we can distribute those workloads across multiple, lower-powered servers, with the same application transparency we enjoy with traditional mirroring today. We will also be able to have more than a single replica for each Availability Group, so we can have one or more local copies (protecting us from localized failures) as well as one or more remote copies (protecting us from entire site failures). Finally, read-only secondaries will allow us to run certain backup operations and all reporting activity against the mirrored copy, taking significant load off the primary server (without the maintenance and overhead of snapshots). These are called Active Secondaries in the official literature; however, I have a gripe with this term – I think it is slightly misleading, since it can imply both read and write activity. And for the first time, we will be able to perform a cluster or mirror failover across subnets in a supported manner, meaning there will be an easy way to set up resiliency between, say, our data centers in Virginia and North Carolina. In addition, a new flexible failover policy allows us to dictate exactly what causes a failover, giving us more control over the tolerance of an instance or availability group to unfavorable conditions within certain server components. These new AlwaysOn features allow us much more power and flexibility in our efforts toward both high availability and disaster recovery, whether we are using Availability Groups or standard Failover Clustering. Please note that AlwaysOn is not a technology in and of itself – it is merely the branding for the high availability and disaster recovery features in SQL Server. Continue at source for the next: Top 5 SQL Server 2012 Features
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