James Luetkehoelter (4/17/2008)
A great article, but...I fundamentally disagree with using replication as a DR technique. Even with 2005, I've run into too many clients that often use replication to keep a standby database but find it difficult in the event of a failure (usually because they aren't prepared) to determine the transactional status of the database - is it current up to what point?
I know that's controversial, but, that's my take. It's also a very "busy" technology that has lots of spots of other failure (usually through misconfiguration). My preference is either low-tech log-shipping, or database mirroring.
Still, an excellent article! I'm just playing devil's advocate.
I have totally agree with you here (great article and that TR is not great for DR 😀 )
If we assume transactional replication is setup perfectly and working, we still need to take your article a bit further and talk about how we would cutover the subscriber database to be the production database? And how we would get the original publishing db back in synch when it was ready to resume its role as primray? Another key consideration would be how much down time we need to make all these switches.