Happy Friday everyone! This one is a quick blog post. There’s an Microsoft Connect item out there – 636516 to be exact – that you guys should go vote for. What is it and why should you care? Read on …

With the new AlwaysOn availability groups feature in SQL Server 2012, we can have readable replicas that will give folks near-real time access to data. This is a big step forward from where we are with solutions like log shipping and database mirroring which have their issues in this arena. However, as it works in SQL Server 2012, if the connection to the primary read/write replica is lost, the readable replica is not usable until that connection is established again. It’s not the end of the world, but in reality, it should probably allow you to use that readable replica even in a disconnected state. That’s what 636516 is all about.

So if you want to be able to use your readable replica when it can’t connect to the primary read/write one, click on the link above and vote. What would help even more is if you added a comment with your use case scenario and how it would impact you. That will help them even more to decide whether or not this will be fixed in a future version of SQL Server.