A word about Microsoft's naming about "Replication" and "AlwaysOn"

 Hi everybody!

As everybody knows, the word "Replication" has a special meaning in Microsoft's SQL Server. The naming however in my belief is inappropriate and misleading, especially for newcomers. The concept "Replication" in general in all the RDBMSs that I know means replicating and cloning your data and propagating updates to some other replica servers, and as a result, achieving several needs: 

resolving a "Single Point of Failure" by creating data redundancy, making the cluster highly available, providing fault tolerance, etc.

So Microsoft's "AlwaysOn" technology is also a replication. If you have noticed, Microsoft also calls the nodes that are involved in an AlwaysOn cluster "Replica"s, which suggests that these nodes are participating in a Replication. 

So one might think: 

Instead, Microsoft could name the so-called "Replication" service, something like "Traditional Replication", "Distributed Replication", "Slow Link Prepared Replication", "Delayed Replication", and "AlwaysOn" as "AlwaysOn Replication" to follow standard reasonable conventions and also keep its own reserved namings.

However, there are some other important marketing factors involved. They definitely have thought of what I just said, but there are always marketing considerations that mostly surpass technical considerations regarding the namings. This is what I personally imagine about what happened:

When "AlwaysOn" was being set up, they could contemplate if they wanted to keep the old "Replication" or not. It seems to be much wiser to do so because some users may still be using this technology and it is widely known and accepted, "Replication" has a "Merge Replication" feature which, despite its conflict limitation, is a similar feature has not yet unfolded for "AlwaysOn" till SQL Server 2019 (Multi-Master replication). The old "Replication" project has also taken so much effort to develop, so it would be a shame to just get away with it.

Even if they wished to retire the old "Replication", they could not name "AlwaysOn" as replication due to marketing strategies. Because this naming was known for the old technology. So could they say for instance "AlwaysOn Replication", "New Replication" or "Replication2"? Certainly not. They also needed to draw customers' attention with the new name. With the discussions between technical and marketing teams, the marketing team may have asked: "What does your new feature do?" The technical team responded, not elaborating on the technical details so much: It's something that can provide highly available 24/7 database service, redundancy, synchronous synchronization, fault tolerance, near-zero downtime, No Data Loss (Which is a dispute though in any DBMS) etc. The marketing team responded "AlwaysOn!!!"

But now we know the truth about namings and concepts here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PostgreSQL's Index Maintenance (B-tree reindex and drop unused indexes)

Image
 This article is not entirely complete yet, but it's still useful: Reindex Maintenance Operation:   Important Points: 1.       All the numbers and intervals in this document are experimental. 2.      All the scripts in this document must be changed mode to executable by using the following command: chmod +x scriptname.sh 3.      These scripts are intended to run as root or a user which can switch user to ‘postgres’ user passwordlessly. 4.      The scripts must run by /bin/sh like the following: /bin/sh scriptname.sh         In some of the bash scripts, you may wonder why there is no while loop. The truth is that there are embedded loops and nested loops, implemented via “bash -c”, “xargs”, or external bash script. •           PostgreSQL provides the index methods B-tree, hash, GiST, spgist, brin and GIN. Default is bt...
Read more

Setup barman 2.14 for PostgreSQL

Image
Author: Ali Momen Last Update Date: Oct. 9th, 2021 Hello everybody! At this time, on October 9th, 2021, the latest barman version for PostgreSQL is 2.14. Barman is great if you master it!!! The following are step-by-step instructions to install and utilize barman on CentOS8. I am inviting you to use these instructions for other Linux distributions as well because most of the materials are concerning barman itself rather than the Linux distribution. There is more to this document than a setup manual though, it's concise and in my belief, comprehensive, very informative, and time-saving: If you republish the materials on this blog, please also cite the reference.   barman documentation online: http://docs.pgbarman.org/release/2.13/     ## barman 2.14 installation on CentOS 8 with postgresql 8.3+: ``` *) This manual is written for CentOS, but it is really recommended for other Linux distributions too because the major difference between diverse Linux distributions in t...
Read more