If you aren’t familiar with Change Tracking I would recommend heading out and reading Kendra Little’s Change Tracking master post which contains a wealth of information. 

I’ve been using CT for a while now and it does what it says on the box. The performance can be painful when querying tables that have changed a lot (the changetable function performs a huge amount of aggregation and seems to be optimized for 1000 rows of data). One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is perform loads into an ODS from a DR site. 

I use AvailabilityGroups to ensure that a near real-time copy of the data is kept in another data center in another part of the country. I’ve tried a couple of times to query the change information from one of the secondary replicas, but sadly it’s not supported and so I would get the error

Msg 22117, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
For databases that are members of a secondary availability replica, change tracking is not supported. Run change tracking queries on the databases in the primary availability replica.

Yesterday I was messing around with database snapshots and was really happy to discover that it is possible to use the changetable function against a snapshot and not receive any errors. This will only work against readable secondary replicas (as the database needs to be online in order to be able to take the snapshot).

This is also the case with log shipped copies of databases. If the database is in standby then you can access the changetable function directly, or do so off a snapshot.

It doesn’t seem like this is a big deal, but if you like to load data into an ODS or Data Warehouse server and it’s not located in the same location as your AG primary, then this is huge as you can asynchronously write data over a WAN and then do all your data loads local to the ODS. This is far more efficient (and your network admin will like you a lot more) than pulling the data over in a large chunk nightly and saturating a part of the network.

Just another way that you can make your DR system work for you.