Active geo-replication is one of the most important business continuity methodologies.
When using active geo-replication, you can configure up to four secondary databases within the same region, or in different regions with reading access. This will help to reduce latency for users or applications that need to query the database from different regions.
If a catastrophic disaster occurs, you can fail over to the other region by using a failover group. Failover groups are mainly designed to manage every aspect of geo-replication automatically, such as connectivity, relationships, and failover. Provided it is available for all databases in respective service tiers in all the regions.
To implement active geo-replication, follow these steps:
- Navigate to the desired database in the Azure portal and click on Geo-Replication, under Settings, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Click on the region that you want to replicate to, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Once the region has been selected, a new blade will pop up, asking you to configure the secondary server for which the database will be replicated; you will have to specify the following:
- Target server: If you have not created another Azure SQL Server in that region to act as a secondary server, you can click on Target server and go through the wizard for creating a new SQL Server (or select an existing one, if you have already created it).
- Pricing tier: Select a pricing tier that is not lower that the original one.
- Once you are done, click on OK.