Solving SQL Server's HA Problem
Gartner released its annual Magic Quadrant for “operational databases” a few weeks ago. The report covers both SQL and NoSQL database providers. Since ScaleArc supports a number of the databases in the report – SQL Server, Oracle, and flavors of MySQL – we’re always interested to see Gartner’s analysis of the providers.
You can check out a full copy of the report by requesting a download from Microsoft’s site.
We spend a lot of time with SQL Server users, so we were particularly interested to compare Gartner’s analysis of Microsoft with the conversations we have with Microsoft’s customers. Gartner cited Microsoft’s strengths as its vision, company execution, and product performance. The research firm highlighted the company’s lack of an appliance, poor market image, and problems with high availability and DR as its weaknesses.
It’s this last point we find so interesting, with Gartner noting "Microsoft received one of the lowest overall scores for ease of implementing HA/DR.” Despite the advances in AlwaysOn, SQL Server still gets poor marks on HA. This analysis tightly aligns with so many of our conversations with SQL Server users. Just a couple weeks ago, for example, we were at PASS, and hundreds of SQL Server customers stopped to talk to us because of our focus on delivering zero downtime for apps. These customers are dealing with availability issues every day. Their applications suffer terrible interruptions during failover – we eliminate that problem by making failover transparent to the app, maintaining client connections and queuing inbound queries during failover.
We love seeing people’s eyes light up when they understand that we can make zero downtime and high availability a reality. It’s satisfying to know that this big gap Gartner has identified is something we know how to fix.
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