Bobby Glover (6/14/2013)
Recent post from Brent Ozar. Is what he is saying correct.In SQL 2012, if your primary drops offline or the cluster loses quorum, the readable replica databases drop offline. (This is hilarious because it’s right when you really want to be able to query the secondaries.) No way to control it – it’s totally automatic. In SQL 14, the secondaries remain online and readable when the primaries aren’t available.
Also are secondaries always just readable copies and therefore can not be used in a DR plan.
To my knowledge yes if the cluster looses quorum the yes it will drop offline depending on your setup, a way around this is to give a quorum vote to a file on a network location this will enable a majority vote.
Secondaries can be readable copies (they don't have to be) but they certainly can be used in a DR plan, if you use synchronous commit then if the primary goes offline then the secondary will automatically fail over and become the primary, if you use asynchronous commit then the fail over has to be done manually.
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