SQL Azure Databases - Active Secondary - Failover Groups - Part 4

150th Blog Post . So, the post involves video demo :)

Previous posts on this series was about using "Geo Replication" to configure active secondary. However, it comes with few limitations like

* No transparent failover capabilities like Always on Listener

* No availability groups and group failover possible

So, Azure Failover Groups provides "Read Only" / "Read Write" connection URLs which allows applications transparent failovers. Read only and Read write workloads get different connection strings and upon failover, applications connect to the appropriate node automatically

Also, one can combine group of databases as a unit of failover and make them failover together as well, as done in Always on availability groups. 

Step by step instructions on configuring availability groups provided below

* Configure Primary Server, Secondary Server and Geo Replication as explained in http://strictlysql.blogspot.sg/2017/05/sql-azure-databases-active-secondary.html

* Click on the primary server ( not database ) and select failover groups

* Click on the add group and

          * Provide the failover group a name
          * Pick the existing database "db1" to be added to the failover group
          * Pick the existing secondary server
          * Click on create

* Once done, failover group is listed as shown below

* Click on the failover group, Read only and Read Write URLs can be seen as shown below

* To perform failover click on the failover icon. Post failover, failover group looks like the picture below

To make the understanding easier, I have recorded the video of the demo. Please take a look. Happy learning