Simple databases / warm failover

  • I have two database servers on the domain. One for production databases and the other is for warm failover.

    And although this sounds like a perfect scenario for log shipping, the rub is that our databases are to remain in Simple mode.

    Can you envision any other automated technique to keep Simple databases nearly aligned?

  • clustering or replication.

    Both will suck for different reasons, but those are your options. Personally I'd lean replication if you don't have too many tables and the workload isn't too high.

    You could also look at SAN snapshotting regularly if your hardware can do that.

  • Thanks for the reply.

    Can replication be configured if the databases are in simple mode?

    Doesn't the nature of replication demand they be in full?

    If not, can you give some more background on replication with simple databases?

  • What's the purpose of the warm standby ? Clustering may be your best bet if it's to protect against hardware failure, but I can't see how you could protect against data loss without a transaction log backup of some type ( be that mirroring / log shipping), which would mean your database can't be in 'simple' recovery.

    [font="Courier New"]sqlmunkee[/font]
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  • Some more background.

    I am hosting an application out of datacenter out east and if it goes down, we'll merely redirect things so app hits the datacenter out west.

    The nature of our data is fairly static. It is hardly transactional.

    Data is loaded a couple times a day from raw source files. Copies of those source files are sent to the out west data center and also imported there to keep the gigantic fact databases sync'd up. Call that the "log" ship. 🙂

    Where I need help are a couple other databases I use for system control stuff (like a logging database) need to stay up to date, too. They are simple, and aren't populated from raw source files. Perhaps the best solution is to change these couple others to Full and manage things with log shipping.

    What are your thoughts?

  • Replication works with any recovery model. The issue is that the log cannot clear until the changes are out to the subscriber. This means that your simple mode db log can grow if your subscriber can't receive changes.

    Given your description, with smaller databases you want to keep up to date, I'd switch them to full and use log shipping. Way less administration than replication and you can manually get things synced up if you need to.

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