By P MAGUIRE
•
11 Jan, 2018
With SQL 2016 AlwaysOn is your 1 shop for everything HA and DR. But with a cost - enterprise licensing. With SQL 2016 Microsoft have release Basic Availability Groups. Think of this as the, long awaited, replacement to SQL Mirroring which has been a deprecated feature since SQL 2012.
So what is it..? Think of it as a watered down version of full Availability Groups, which mirrors (excuse pun) the functionality of SQL Mirroring but enhances it a bit. And its available with Standard Edition licensing. It works, with its limitations, and if that's all you need then perfect. It uses Windows Clustering for the availability and listener pieces so its a trusted technology. Barring the limitations its great...
Limitations
Single DBs in single groups
Secondary's are not directly accessible
Cannot offload backups etc to secondary
Unless you have a customer that wants HA DR in SQL 2016 but doesn't want to pay Enterprise licensing. Well you can use Agent jobs, alerts and scripts to mimic some of the behaviour for full AlwaysOn Availability Group but it comes with a warning...
Will follow up with further material or contact for more info...