Well, it’s official – SQL Server v.Next which has been in preview is going to be SQL Server 2017. This was announced at the DataAmp event. While we do not have an  release date, it’ll be sooner rather than later. CTP 2.0 was just released today, so go and play with it.

There are two improvements for AGs in CTP 2.0 over 1.4 for listeners on Linux:

• The listener will now be persisted post-failover (I have yet to test this … will do so soon)
• Read only routing should be working in this releas

In other words, the listener should work properly now in CTP 2.0.

Also, there is a new CLUSTER_TYPE called External. I’ll blog more about this another time, but this is a follow on to the AGs that do not need an underlying WSFC or Pacemaker cluster that I blogged about here.

That’s it – not a long post, but all good stuff.