I like that there is a “Compare” function right out-of-the-box in Visual Studio, and even though many regular developers will choose to download a third-party application for the job, it’s perfectly fine for me.
Two problems: First off, I couldn’t find a straightforward way to open “compare” in the Visual Studio IDE without right-clicking an existing item in a source control repository. And second, wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a shortcut to it on the Windows “Send to” context menu?
AlwaysOn Availability Groups are a reasonably simple way to set up disaster recovery (DR) for your SQL Server environment, and with fairly little effort, you can get a bit of high availability (HA) from it as well. But there are a few gotchas, the most obvious of them being that Availability Groups only synchronize specific user-databases, not the entire server setup.
Things that are not included in AGs include logins, SQL Server Agent jobs, SSIS packages stored in SQL Server, linked servers and server settings. You could sync these manually (as is often the case), but wouldn’t you just love to have an automated process do all this for you?
In this post, we’ll look at logins. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume that you have a primary replica with a single AG and any number of secondary replicas. The logic holds true if you have multiple AGs, it just gets trickier.
If you’re a consultant connecting to remote client servers, or if you have a heterogenous network environment with different Active Directory forests without established trust relationships, you’ll have a few extra challenges connecting to SQL Server using Windows authentication, and SQL Server authentication may not be available.