SQL Server 2016 Always On Enhancements

SQL Server 2016 Always On Enhancements

I have already spoken about SQL 2016 Performance features and Security features. SQL Server Always On was first introduced in 2012 Enterprise Edition. From day 1, it looked promising and had great adoption rates all across SQL Server Enterprise Edition deployments worldwide. SQL Server 2014 enhanced it a bit more with the introduction of additional Secondary Replicas, from 4 to 8. It also introduced “Add Azure Replica Wizard” to have a Highly Available site hosted in Azure for both DR and HA.

With SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced additional enhancements for the already good Always On Availability groups feature.

Microsoft has introduced a basic edition of Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition. It will provide support for One primary and One secondary replica, No additional Replicas. This capability replaces Database Mirroring technology for high availability.

SQL Server 2016 Always On Availability Groups Features

Greater scalability:

• Load balancing with multiple readable secondaries
• Increased number of auto-failover targets
• Transaction Log transport performance

Improved manageability:

• Distributed Transaction Controller (DTC) support
• Database-level health monitoring
• Group managed service account

Readable Secondary load balancing

You can now Load-balance read-intent connection requests and is now supported across a set of read-only replicas. The previous behavior always directed connections to the first available read-only replica in the routing list.

More from Microsoft Official Documentation here.