http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged Strategies, Disaster Recovery posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/logshippingvsreplication/1399/2008/06/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/logshippingvsreplication/1399/In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/stepbystepclustering/356/2008/01/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/stepbystepclustering/356/Learn about 13 production disasters that can bring down your businesshttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3173/2007/08/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3173/In response to an editorial on eliminating tape in favor of disk backups, new author Tim OPry brings us a look at his environment and the process by which they eliminated the need for tape in their backup scheme while maintaining a well thought out disaster plan. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/2756/2007/01/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/2756/While no disaster recovery plan provides ironclad protection, your company will be far less vulnerable to an extended business disruption from a disaster with a plan than without one.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2707/2006/12/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2707/In the first part of his series on SQL Server Availability, new author Kumar Parthasarathi brings us a look at Database Snapshots in SQL Server 2005. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/2598/2006/09/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/2598/Learn how to use ALERTs, a SQL Agent job and a stored procedure (SP) to create a copy of your critical database backups on another physical machine as soon as the database backups are created.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2587/2006/09/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2587/Knowing how to configure backup applications and select backup media is half the battle of designing a successful backup strategy. The other half is choosing how and when to back up the specific pieces of data that are stored on your servers, share points, and workstations. In this final article of his series on backup basics for new technicians and administrators, Ryan Faas offers some suggestions to help you make these important decisions.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2542/2006/08/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2542/SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/logshippingvsreplication/1399/2008/06/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/logshippingvsreplication/1399/Every DBA needs to know how to do their work under pressure, while facing crisis after crisis. Our most important contribution is to keep the database running. It's an on-call function; you never know what might happenhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2513/2006/07/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2513/This article by Andy Warren includes code samples showing you how to restore a database from a file or a device backup. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL-DMO/sqldmorestore/118/2006/06/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL-DMO/sqldmorestore/118/Differential backups are left out of many DBAs backup strategy, but they are a great tool to shrink your backup window, save disk space, and more. However they can be slightly tricky when you look to perform a restore. New author Qian Ye brings us an interesting issue that occured during differential testing. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/differentialbackuptricks/2439/2006/06/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/differentialbackuptricks/2439/Everyone wants a highly available system, but achieving 4 or 5 9s of uptime is hard to do. Especially when you have cost limitations. New author Mark Cook takes a look at how his company analyzed the challenges and which method they chose along with some implementation details. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/achievingserverredundancyatremoteoffices/2391/2006/05/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/achievingserverredundancyatremoteoffices/2391/Not the traditional overview here. Steve Jones takes a look at the various high availability technologies from a different perspective. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/sqlserver2005highavailability/2421/2006/05/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/sqlserver2005highavailability/2421/Disaster recovery solutions is always a concern with SQL Server and when a new or unique solution comes up, we like to get it out there. New author Kevin Parks brings us a look at his way of using a USB hard drive and Windows PE to ensure recovery. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/backupyourdatabasewithusb/2408/2006/05/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/backupyourdatabasewithusb/2408/Ensuring the availability of your database servers is becoming more important all the time. Fortunately you have more choices than ever. Bilal Ahmed looks at some of the possible solutions available for SQL Server. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/businesscontinuityforsqlserverswithastandbyapproac/2375/2006/04/26http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/businesscontinuityforsqlserverswithastandbyapproac/2375/Testing is key to ensuring a process actually works when it comes time to implement, rather than finding out when time may be of the essence. This holds true for testing SQL Server restores as well. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2385/2006/04/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2385/Building a highly fault tolerant and available SQL Server is expensive and difficult. This brings about unique challenges for small businesses who often lack the resources of large enterprises. Bilal Ahmed and Shivan Bindal discuss the various ways of building redundancy and the challenges of each. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/sqlserverredundancyforsmbs/2264/2006/02/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/sqlserverredundancyforsmbs/2264/Building a highly available system is hard. This short white paper from Sonasoft shows some of the differences between a cluster and their standby server product. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/microsoftsqlserverclustervsstandbyserver/2126/2005/10/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/microsoftsqlserverclustervsstandbyserver/2126/The second installment of this series discussed the cost of maintaining systems with various levels of downtime, ways data can be lost, and what constitutes a backup. In this installment, I discuss how to configure your hardware to minimize the need to restore a backup. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2095/2005/09/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2095/How much backup data should you keep around and what are the implications? Part 2 of a series looking at backups and their implications.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2046/2005/08/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2046/How many times have you run out of space in a database? What about on a file system? Andy Warren has had this happen a few times, especially when large imports take place. He brings us an article that describes some of the precautions he has taken to prevent this from happening. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/runningoutofspace/1971/2005/07/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/runningoutofspace/1971/Ever do something to your SQL Server 2000 server and then realize you've just broken something major? Ever have a moment when you want to go "whoops", but really feel like crying ot running away? Steve Jones just had one of those and gives you a few things to think about when you deal with a situation like that. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/thedbawhoops/1932/2005/06/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/thedbawhoops/1932/Backing up SQL Server data is like many of the things we do because we figure we need to. It is good for you, like eating a good diet and getting exercise. Unfortunately, folks are often about as successful with SQL Server backups as they are with diet and exercise. This is the first in a series of articles covering SQL Server database backup. The series starts from the very basics of why database backup is important. The question of why to backup a database can inform many other decisions.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1864/2005/05/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1864/In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/stepbystepclustering/356/2008/01/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/stepbystepclustering/356/Clustering a SQL Server machine was one of the most frustrating tasks a DBA and Windows administrator had to accomplish in SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT 4.0. With the maturity of both the OS and the DBMS in Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, this operation has been simplified tremendously. This first article in the series of article on clustering SQL Server will explain the general architecture of clustering. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/clustering_a_sql_server_machine_/344/2004/11/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/clustering_a_sql_server_machine_/344/Another in our series of things you should avoid at all costs. Seems silly at first, not having a detailed recovery plan for your SQL Server. Perhaps it is, but having dealt with any number of problems over the last few years, Steve Jones has some ideas why a detailed plan may not be the best thing to spend your time on. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/worstpracticedetaileddisasterplans/1533/2004/11/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/worstpracticedetaileddisasterplans/1533/Part 2 of Steve Jones' Incident Response series that looks at how you should be prepared as well as what to do when disaster strikes. Part 1 established a basic framework and part 2 dives deeper into what you might need for the next virus, hardware failure, or hurricane :(. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/incidentresponserespondingtoanincident/1524/2004/10/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/incidentresponserespondingtoanincident/1524/Do you have a SQL Server disaster plan? What about something less than a disaster? Steve Jones has worked more than his share of disasters or incidents, some of them self-inflicted. He's taken some of his experience and started a new series looking at a framework for dealing with incidents. Read part 1 about getting prepared. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/incidentresponsetheframework/1473/2004/08/26http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Disaster+Recovery/incidentresponsetheframework/1473/Hurricane Charlie had a pretty substantial impact on residents and businesses in Central Florida. Andy lives in the Orlando area and wrote up some notes on the various challenges he ran into it. Out of it you might find a couple things worth thinking about adding into your DR plan. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/disasterintherealworldhurricane/1472/2004/08/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/disasterintherealworldhurricane/1472/