We are happy to announce General Availability of Named replicas in the Hyperscale tier of Azure SQL Database. We released public preview of this feature in June 2021, since then this feature has been improved and adopted by many customers across industries.
Named replicas is an addition to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale to scale-out a variety of read workloads, be it highly concurrent OLTP workloads or HTAP solutions for real-time data analytics.
Named Replicas uses cases:
- Flexibility: Scale-out read workloads to up to 30 read replicas. Each replica can be scaled to different compute size (Service Level Objectives) than primary compute, to cater to dynamic workloads. For example, new replicas can be added, or existing replicas can be scaled-up to cater peak times like end of month processing/sale period, etc and scale down during lean business times.
- Isolation: Multiple application users can work in isolation on their respective named replica as logins/AD group can be granted isolated access and dedicated connection endpoint to respective replica.
- Cost savings for read scale-out: Since named replicas share same storage as primary replica, storage cost is saved, and license charge does not apply to named replicas. There are additional cost savings opportunities when named replicas can be scaled down compared to the primary.
- Serve modern application architectures for Analytical workloads including Data Science and Reporting.
Reference architecture diagram shared below explains utilization of Azure SQL Database Hyperscale for a variety of workloads. Reporting Application 2 connects to a named replica having smaller compute size than primary. Another two named replicas are utilized by Application 3 for Analytical workloads both scaled to different compute sizes to cater to dynamic workloads.
Hyperscale Reference Architecture
Named Replicas documentation: Hyperscale secondary replicas - Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Docs
Named Replicas FAQs: Azure SQL Database Hyperscale named replicas FAQ - Azure SQL | Microsoft Docs
Sample to enable OLTP read scale-out using Named Replicas: Azure-Samples (github.com)
Customer Story: Build fast, scalable data system on Azure SQL Database Hyperscale | Clearent
