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I don't know how I missed this feature! Thanks for the blog post!

Personally I think this feature, while somewhat interesting, is next to useless in the real world. Fewer and fewer databases these days are getting batch updated, and more and more are edging closer to real time. This means that there is no easy window of opportunity for replacing the read-only copy--maybe if you only update occasionally, say once an hour, you could do a rolling restore? Either way, it's going to be quite a pain to get this thing automatically humming and probably not worth the effort IMHO.

Now if it was read-write that would be a whole different thing...

+1 vote for NEXT-TO-USELESS.

I agree with Adam on its not being practically useful. I'm not sure if anyone is actually using it in the real world.

+1 next to useless! I remember getting excited when i first read about this and then as i digested it found the logistics of keeping the database up to date meant it was not worth the effort. I then asked myself "Why did Microsoft introduce this?". "Who is actually using this feature?"

If it had been read/write as Adam says it would be a whole different ball game.....

Yes, agreed, in our environment we don't have a window where we can just detach MDF files and make copies available to other servers.  I guess this is for those folks that run 9-5 shops where the database can be offline for a maintenance window every night?  When I first read about it, I was excited too.  But I learned very quickly that it is not very practical to implement.

If you are willing to use two sets of volumes and are content with stale data, you could do much better with some common SAN technology such as doing a disk array volume split and have another instance accessing that split volume. Why then go through all the trouble to 'share the volume'?

In today computing environment, it is almost useless :)

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Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout

HP's Polyserve Product IMHO does this better.  It allows other servers to mount the DB as read-only while a single node is read/write. Interesting....

Scalable shared databases are a good idea for read-only access to a central database. With multiple distinct SQL servers hitting this shared store, CPU intensive workloads will perform better. The question is how can you build on this when i/o is also maxed out, and what can you do if access needs to be read/write?

At xkoto, we have a product called GRIDSCALE that provides a solution for these challenges. GRIDSCALE takes multiple shared nothing, non-partitioned databases and manages read/write client access to this pool. GRIDSCALE ensures consistent results, regardless of which database processes the query.

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Is it possible to implement this feature in Clarion environment or this is possilbe only in Symmetrix.

Thank you