No rugby on last weekend so I didn’t have anything to distract me from working. On another note, my flat has never been cleaner!

So last week Microsoft announced Availability Groups for SQL Server on Linux.

This is a big announcement as one of the first things I noticed when playing around with a SQL instance on Linux was the lack of high availability features. (I wrote a post on manually setting up transaction log shopping here).

Microsoft hasn’t released a stripped down version of Availability Groups either. They’ve said in the post that:-

all capabilities that make Availability Groups a flexible, integrated and efficient HADR solution are available on Linux as well

So are we looking at SQL on Linux moving towards an edition that will rival its windows counterpart in features and usability? I think that’s what Microsoft’s end goal will be, a platform independent relation database system.

That for us as SQL Server DBAs mean interesting times ahead. In the future not only will we be looking at the usual options when building our SQL Server instances, we’ll be looking at the pros and cons of the supporting operating system and then making our decisions. Could lead to some interesting design room discussions.

I’ve said before that I think this is great. It’s opening up a whole new world to me as a DBA, I love learning new areas of technology so I can’t wait to get my hands on this and start playing around.

Have a good week!