Microsoft® SQL Server High Availability

Summary

Using programmatic methods to achieve a high availability solution will vary in its success and complexity. I've seen shops that start their thinking as a distributed application and prefer to “design in” the high availability elements themselves. They leverage more basic fault tolerant components such as RAID for disk fault tolerance and MS cluster services for hardware/server fault tolerance. They often do not use things such as SQL clustering or replication because they have had their applications up and running for many years, long before these new HA techniques were even available for use. This is very prevalent in applications built in the financial industry.

By designing in the high availability elements (such as primary and secondary ...