Thomas Mucha (9/26/2013)
I am looking into AlwaysOn Availabilty Groups as both an HA and load spreading solution. But there is something I would like to clarify before I present to management.Our production databases suffer from lots of blocking and deadlocks. Will this resource contention be "replicated" on the replica databases when the logs are applied? I'd like to offload many of the read operations (adhoc reports, etc.) to the replicas but don't just want to end up in the same situation as I am in now.
Thanks for any help.
Tom
p.s. - work is underway to address deadlocking, but it won't be fixed any time soon 🙁
It has been my experience consulting with numerous clients that deadlocks and blocking are most often rather easily addressed by proper indexing and it usually isn't very hard to figure out what index(es) to put where to accomplish the objectives.
Personally, given the hardware and licensing costs (and quite possibly consulting costs if you get help to get AGs done up right) to do SQL 2012 EE AGs, I would REALLY recommend doing a tuning exercise FIRST. It is quite possible that you can kill FOUR birds with one stone: faster queries, less blocking AND fewer deadlocks AND saving money because you won't NEED new hardware/EE licenses.
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service