Who is Using CAGs?

Who is Using CAGs?

From Voice of the DBA by Steve Jones

May 3, 2026 · 3 min · Season 12 · Episode 46

About this episode

The episode discusses the use of Contained Availability Groups in enterprise environments and the challenges of maintaining consistency across systems.

While talking to a customer a few weeks ago, they mentioned that they used Contained Availability Groups (CAG) everywhere. They also said they were amazing and wondered why everyone wasn't using them in other environments. Of course, I questioned the "everywhere", which turned out to be more of a default for new systems than a standard across all systems. That's likely true of most things since it's rare we get to update/patch/set something across an environment of any size and ensure every system is the same. Still, setting a CAG as a default makes some sense for enterprises. This ensures that in an HA situation I have my logins, jobs, etc. already on a secondary node. That's been one of the challenges of using lightly linked systems that only sync up database level information. Log shipping, Replication, Availability Groups can all work to keep a secondary ready to take over, but they all miss information that is stored in master or msdb. Read the rest of Who is Using CAGs?

People in this episode

Host: Steve Jones

Topics covered

  • Contained Availability Groups
  • high availability
  • database management
  • enterprise systems
  • data synchronization

Keywords

  • CAG
  • high availability
  • log shipping
  • replication
  • database synchronization

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Contained Availability Groups

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