Database Maintenance Using Secondary Replicas

Abstract

Now that you have deployed your high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) solution using Always On Availability Groups, it’s important to ensure that you are maximizing the investment made in the solution by fully utilizing all the replicas. Unfortunately, we still find database administrators (DBAs) using the primary replica for almost everything and rarely using the secondary replicas for production, reporting and/or database maintenance workloads. It’s very common to see DBAs using the secondary replicas only for DR just like they did with older HADR solutions. Most of the older solutions did not allow use of the secondary replicas for anything except for DR and one of the tasks from customers was the ability to fully utilize the secondaries.