Availability for Azure SQL

You have now made the journey from deploy to configure to security and then to scale, monitor, and tune performance. The final piece of the core of Azure SQL is availability. I have rarely talked to a SQL Server customer over the years that didn’t need their database to be highly available. I also almost never talk to a customer who doesn’t care about being able to recover from a disaster. Therefore, this chapter is really about High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) for Azure SQL. I will tell you that in my opinion after now assessing and using Azure SQL over this last year, the built-in capabilities for HADR for Azure SQL are one of the great stories of the service. In fact, I believe after you go through this chapter you will be convinced that looking at Azure SQL as a target for your deployment is worth it just on the HADR capabilities alone.