Welcome to the fifth in the series of our SQL Server 2022 feature-specific posts. Last week we looked at the new link feature from SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance, and this week Contained Availability Groups.
When will we have SQL Server 2022?
For those who don’t know, SQL Server 2022 is coming and should be released later in 2022. At the time of writing, you can now download SQL Server 2022 preview to try the new features in the latest release.
‘SQL Server 2022 is the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, with continued innovation across performance, security, and availability.’ – Microsoft.
What is an Availability Group?
Availability Groups were initially introduced back in SQL Server 2012 and provide a replicated environment for a specific set of user Databases called Availability Databases.
This replicated environment comprises a set of read-write Primary Databases and corresponding locations of Secondary Databases.
An Availability Group can be configured for either High Availability (HA) or read-scale. An HA Availability Group comprises Databases that failover at the same time.
The Always On Availability Groups is a High Availability and Disaster Recovery feature. It doesn’t require shared disk storage for hosting the SQL Server. However, the Enterprise edition supports the Always On Availability Group.
Contained Availability Groups
SQL Server 2012 introduced us to Availability Groups, but since then, we have always been missing the ability to synchronise server-level objects between replicas. SQL Server 2022 finally changes that (10 years later) with the introduction of Contained Availability Groups.
With SQL Server 2022, you will (finally) be able to create an availability group with its users, logins, permissions, and SQL Agent jobs – this will free up time that Database Administrators would have needed to keep these server-level objects up to date.
For example, if you previously wanted to grant access for a new login to an availability group database, you had to create the user on all servers hosting the availability group.
Hopefully, that is an excellent brief introduction to Contained Availability Groups; next week, we’ll be looking at the Azure Synapse Link for SQL, so stay tuned!
Digital Samurai
Are you excited by the new version of SQL 2022? At Digital Samurai, we certainly are! We would love to hear your thoughts.
It may also benefit you to know that on the 27th of July 2022, extended support ended for SQL Server version 2012. Is this a version you are using, or any prior?
If you have any questions on SQL Server 2022 or upgrading to the later versions of SQL Server, please feel free to get in touch; we will be delighted to assist.
Digital Samurai are a team of data and SQL experts that have experienced every version through the years – yes, back to SQL Server 6.0! We also have a wealth of experience in upgrades and migrations and are always available to help.