Differential Backup Tricks

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.

Achieving Server Redundancy at Remote Offices

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.

SQL Server 2005 High Availability

Not the traditional overview here. Steve Jones takes a look at the various high availability technologies from a different perspective.

Back Up Your Database With USB

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.

Business Continuity for SQL Servers With a Standby Approach

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.

Testing SQL Server restores

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.

SQL Server Redundancy for SMBs

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.

Microsoft SQL Server Cluster Vs Standby Server

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.

Minimizing the need to restore a backup

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.

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