With the launch of SQL 2012, much of my focus has been on the new Availability Groups functionality. I do lots of work in the HA and DR space, and the ability to utilize secondary copies of databases is an outstanding functionality enhancement to SQL Server. Additionally, now we can have multiple secondary replicas (up to three). One thing to consider is licensing—a lot of organizations used to leave their DR servers unlicensed—which is perfectly fine with Microsoft, as long are you are not using it. If you are using the read-only, or secondary backup functionality, those servers must be licensed. However, this will still be a lot cheaper than the alternatives.

As some of you may know, I also work with Oracle databases in my role—I’m on a cross functional Infrastructure Architecture team. Recently, I was involved in a project where I had the opportunity to evaluate Oracle’s Active…