Summary
Availability is paramount to the success of most database projects and is becoming increasingly important for business requirements. Log shipping, failover clustering, database mirroring, AlwaysOn, and replication are all high-end features to provide a stable database environment for the users.
Log shipping is a robust and reliable high-availability, disaster recovery and reporting solution that can be implemented easily with the hardware that you already have, and there is no need to purchase any new, costly hardware. Log shipping backs up the transaction log on the primary server every few minutes and restores it on the warm standby servers. If the primary server stops working, you can make one of the warm standby servers your new primary server. The main problem with log shipping is that the role change is a manual process, and the DBA needs to be present to execute the role change. It is possible to automate most of the role change process using SQL Server Agent jobs, but still there is some manual intervention required, and the clients must be manually redirected to the new primary server.
The next chapter discusses database mirroring, which also provides per database protection like log shipping and provides an automatic failover option.
Get Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
