I've been looking at the new features of SQL Server 2012, and how it can help my current situation.
Currently we're on SQL Server 2008R2, and replicate two OLTP database servers to a single reporting server via transactional replication. We then use these replicated DBs for reporting.
I'm interested in whether SQL Server 2012 and the Availability Groups can replace this - So instead of transactional replication, I'd use the new availability groups and mirror the two OLTP servers to the replication server - Where the reporting will be able to access the read-only copies.
I'm unsure if this will work well, or even at all.
Does anyone have any good examples or experience with this?
Personally I think this will work a lot better than transactional replication, though I haven't done any formal comparisons of the two in a true migration scenario. I know that with the amount of troubles folks have with transactional replication, compared to even standard mirroring (and this is an upgrade of that), you are certainly bound to have fewer problems.
The biggest boon is that the secondary can be marked as read only - so you can run all the reporting off of it that you want, and it won't affect the mirroring at all. You just need beefier tempdb (since it essentially uses rcsi to do this).
Of course you do need to be aware that both sides of the AG need to be fully licensed in order to use the replica for read-only operations. And both sides need to be running on a version of Windows that supports FCIs (so Enterprise or better on Windows Server 2008 R2 or lower; Standard or better on Windows Server 2012 and higher) - the SQL instances in AGs don't need to be clustered, but they need to be sitting on top of that infrastructure in the OS.