Separate Reads

Voice of the DBA

Recently I was watching a presentation on how to scale performance in your SQL Server environment and one of the suggestions was setting up Availability Groups (AGs) and having read-intent connections that would query the secondary and not the primary. It's not a bad idea, and the SQL Native Client (and other drivers) support this and make it easy to implement.

The pattern of using multiple connections in an application, one for reads and one for writes, has been suggested often. However, in practice, I've rarely seen this work. Apparently having a connection variable, named dbConn, for writes and a second one, named dbConnReadOnly, for reads is too complex for most developers or teams.

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