So many of you may have noticed I haven’t said much about the new high availability stuff coming in Denali that was announced back at PASS in November. Well, besides being busy, I have known about it and seen it for quite awhile through various NDA sessions, and I’m just now finding the time to play with it using CTP1 of Denali.

Because the new availability feature (which has been affectionately been dubbed HADRON by many for now) requires a Windows failover cluster but is not a SQL Server failover cluster in the way you think about it now (more on that soon …), there has been a lot of debate whether the requirement of Windows Server Enterprise, which is the minimum edition that has the failover clustering feature, will be a barrier for deployment even if HADRON is implemented in SQL Server Standard. While I have posted a simple Yes or No poll, I’d love to see your detailed thoughts in the comments.

[poll id=”2″]

The reason this is interesting is that Windows Server Enterprise has always been the minimum version for clusters of any kind. And unlike SQL Server where the price vastly differs from edition to edition, the cost to go from Standard to Enterprise of Windows is not on the same magnitude.

Now, I’m also trying to figure out the format of my Denali book. A few questions:

[poll id=”3″]

I’m leaning towards one big one. This one is going to be more than a simple HA book … it’s going to be that plus more stuff.

[poll id=”4″]

Although I haven’t written about database mirroring or log shipping since my 2005 book, do you guys want to see me cover it in the Denali book?