Comments on: SQL SERVER – Standby Servers and Types of Standby Servers

By: SQL SERVER – Database Mirroring and Fine-Prints – Quiz – Puzzle – 23 of 31 « SQL Server Journey with SQL Authority

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By: jimson

jimson — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:45:19 +0000

would you know how to link a server to analysis services 8.0 so that I can pass mdx query through sql from powerbuilder.

By: Pinal Dave

Pinal Dave — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:10:14 +0000

Hello Mike,

On production server where database is used just for read a Mirrored database can be configured and then create a snapshot of mirrored database for reading purpose.
Mirroring in asynchronous mode (high performance) does not much affect the performance of primary database.

Regards,
Pinal Dave

By: Pinal Dave

Pinal Dave — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:09:53 +0000

Hello Mike,

Regards,
Pinal

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:04:35 +0000

Dave
Here is our current situation..
Our production server has databases where it is used just to read the data and we have another server where we load data (no updates) and then backup it up and restore on to production with different name and then switch over the databases which is a 5 min downtime for production databases.
sql 2005 Ent,Win 2003,litespeed,databse size range from 300GB – 2 TB.
Now I am plnning to reduce the time spent on backing up and restoring on to production, do you think mirroring or any other option will work and how expensive they are.

By: Vijay

Vijay — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:10:52 +0000

Level 1
————
Our company has certain data which requires high availability so we use the database mirroring along with witness ( debatable) to make sure we can switch over with no data loss.

Having said that, the challenge here is to maintain not only the database but also the ssis packages hosted on the server, ssrs reports on the server.

Since this information is stored on msdb, it becomes very critical as we cannot replicate the msdb database as far as I know, as it will have the reference to the original msdb database.

So we had planned to replicate the entire scenario of ssis packages and ssrs reports on to the mirror server.

The next challege here is the principal server has certain data integrations to another sql server. These integrations have to be replicated but the server reference has to be changed if linked servers are used.

The next challenge we had is to do database mirroring between different locations for eg. US and europe, we achieved this by creating a common domain for the sql servers and it worked like charm. Now the speed could be a issue will keep posted based on the performance.

The level1 gives the comfort of high availability of data with automatic failover even in case of a server failure.

Level 2
———-
The data is backed up daily and transaction backups are done every 2 hours.

Level 3
———-
The data is stored external to the building.

By: Phong Ha

Phong Ha — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:55:45 +0000

Our company is very interested in a cold standby strategy as part of a DRP for one of our customers. The goal is to incur as little as possible any up time expenses in terms of infrastructure maintenance, licensing and energy costs, etc…

Acceptable parameters:

1. Recover within 4-8 hours.
2. Last night’s full backup.
3. Cost no more than $50 a month.

Nice to have:

1. Ability to scale out recovered environment when deemed necessary.
2. Up to the minute recovery of transaction data.
3. Recover within 1-2 hours.

I conducted a proof-of-concept a few months ago that is being called into action currently. The plan is to use the low cost non-Cap. Ex. cloud computing hosted by Amazon.

On the Amazon Cloud, we quickly put together three servers, a DC, a Citrix server farm with a single server in it, and a MSSQL server running on Amazon’s Standard Large AMI. Once configured to the way we want, these images are bundled and saved on the Amazon S3.

Challenges:

1. DRP involves more than just the database server, changes to the DC and user profiles also need recovering. What is the best and easiest way to replicate changes to the dormant environment. We know all changes would have to be stored on the S3 in Amazon to be replayed later. Would daily exporting of AD objects suffice?

2. Is doing a daily full backup a good idea even though the databases are relatively small, lets assume, 25 databases each about 4 GB. With this strategy, we can only guarantee the recovery of last night’s backup. We also have hourly transaction log backups. How can we best make use of these log backups to meet one of the “nice to have” requirements?

3. Are there other challenges we have not foresee?

By: Rsurfer

Rsurfer — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:16:29 +0000

using Netapp Filers for our storage and utilizing snapmirror we have a mix of it all. We have production running on sql2005 while transactions are backed up hourly, once the backup is done the data is mirrored to the mirrored volume at at DR site. At the DR site we have a sql2005 box ready to mount any of these mirrored, verified volumes. From there we can do a restore via Netapp SME, and get the db where we want it.