Thanks for the replies but I think I've now got more questions than I had before. What's the best way of checking that clustering, mirroring and replication are set up and running right? We're 'only' the Reporting Team and there's not a massive amount of DBA experience about. We can query the databases and make a beautiful whizzy report to show you pretty much anything you want, but if you ask us how things are running then there's only so much we can do. Yes, there is recruitment going on for a DBA but until then we're a bit in the dark.