Fundamental to the use of any agency
software is the ability to recover from a loss of the main
computer where the agency's data is stored. Disaster recovery
or DR as it is known looks a methods to maintain high availability
when part of the core process fails.
Yesterday the was a meeting of DBAs at the
Microsoft UK HQ (Thames Valley Park, Reading). This was held
under the banner of Tony Rogerson's SQL Server FAQ user group. There were
presentations given by Clive Challinor, SQL Core
Escalation engineer and Daniel Sol SQL Server Technical Support
engineer. In many respects the presentations were made at a high
technical level, while still being an overview of some of the
issues, mainly commonly held misconceptions, concerning memory and
page file usage in SQL 2008.
At the other end of the scale, I gave a brief overview of a
product which was news to quite a few present. One of the
deficiencies of the Express edition of MS SQL 2008 is the lack of
an easy to use backup scheduler. SQLBackupAndFTP is an excellent little
application that nicely (in the true sense of the word) fills the
void in SQL Express 2008 functionality.
Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVP
then gave a good overview of Building a Resilient Environment -
Backups/Restore; Log Shipping and Mirroring. Tony looked at the
basics an environment needs in order to be able to recover from
problems be they an administrator dropping tables accidentally,
users deleting data, corruption etc applicable for SQL Express
through to Enterprise editions. What is available and how to set it
up and how it works, the concepts, point in time recovery, Log
Shipping fundamentals and Mirroring Fundamentals.