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
presentation 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.