I hosted this month, but I decided to put my own entry in as well. There are more things in this release than I expected, probably because of the overwhelming focus on Fabric from Microsoft that has drowned out other changes.
I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.
Security is a close second, but backups really matter.
I was excited to see that full and differential backups can be set on secondary replicas in AGs. To be fair, I had assumed this would be working by SQL Server 2022, but I hadn’t checked. Glad it’s been added. I know, I know, I questioned if you need HA, but that’s more a staffing question than one of whether HA makes sense in general.
Backups, especially on larger systems, can be a load on the server. We’ve seen this with compressed backups natively, or with something like SQL Backup. As a result, offloading this to another system is something I’d want to do.
Of course, there’s still the challenge of making sure you get these all organized in one place (don’t have the 1 copy of your diff only on one secondary), but that’s a separate post.