With all the announcements about SQL Server 2014 this last week there have been a lot of questions about what’s going to happen for SQL Server 2014 and the non-shared storage High Availability options as we are now one step closer to database mirroring being removed from the product. You’ll see several blog posts coming out this morning from a variety of people all with their own opinions about what should be included. These opinions are mine and mine alone.
In SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition and up we had database mirroring which supported having a single mirror on site which was synchronous mirroring only with asynchronous mirroring being an Enterprise Edition feature. I would like to see this same feature set moved into the SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition product as well. How I would see this working would be the normal AlwaysOn Availability Group configuration that we have today but only supporting a single replica. I can see synchronous data movement being the only data movement option which would allow for a local onsite HA without giving you the ability for geographically distributed disaster recovery as that requires asynchronous data movement.
If Microsoft wanted to do something really nice for their Standard Edition customers they could allow for a second replica which would be an Azure database replica and that would allow for Disaster Recovery within Standard Edition while pushing Azure (which we all know is a big deal for Microsoft these days).
So there you have it, that’s what I would like to see in the SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition version of the product. Do I expect to see it, honestly I’m really not sure. Microsoft has been very tight lipped about what is coming in the Standard Edition, mostly because these decisions haven’t been made yet. Once they are someone people will be happy, others wont be, but that’ll be what we have to deal with until we do this all over again in a couple more years when the next version of SQL Server is released.
Denny