• Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2005 works this way.

    The Primary, witness and Secondary forms a quorom of three after a successful setup. A fail over will occur if Witness and Secondary agrees that Primary is dead, so they will form a quorom of two and automatic fail over will initiate within 3 seconds. Your secondary/mirror will act as the Primary/Principal. Now, once you restart Server 1 which as the original principal server before the failover it will find out that the mirror server (server 2) is the acting Principal server, so Server 1 will take the role of Mirror server this time. In this case you need to manually failover to server 1 by executing this statement on Server 2

    "ALTER DATABASE database_name SET PARTNER FAILOVER" .

    This TSQL statement will revert the Principal role to Server 1...

    Albert B. Matubis
    Database Administrator: Trend Micro PH
    MCP. MCAD. MCDBA. MCT
    MCTS: SQL Server 2005
    MCTS: Business Intelligence
    MCITP: Database Administrator
    MCITP: Business Intelligence Applications Developer