The Copy Cat Poll

  • Current client has at least 7-8 copies including the data, sometimes obfuscated, excluding backups and schema only copies. Probably double that. I don't know about the backups, except that they exist, but the schema copies can be counted in their tens.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • Newer SAN's have a 'de-duplication' feature intended for these scenarios. You snapshot the drives used by one SQL instance to store files and present them as new drives to another. The new drives initially consume very little storage although it grows over time. I'm not an expert on it but am involved, just from a SQL perspective, in a project to implement it. The new SAN also includes 'thin provisioning' and other features to optimise storage capacity and utilisation.

  • This is an old topic but I'll add to it.

    My company puts client medical claims through a rules engine to analyze for fraud, waste and abuse. Although client data is rarely duplicated, our rules and stored procs are. The rules db, with about 150 tables with a billion+ rows, is replicated to about 30 servers serving 100+ client dbs. The stored procs are duplicated on each client db. Keeping things in sync can be problematic despite our monitoring systems.

  • For each database in our org.

    1 Production (failover cluster)

    1 Production Mirror

    1 Reporting Server (copy from midnight)

    1 International copy to EU

    1 International copy Mirror

    1 Full backup (onsite)

    1 Full backup (offsite)

    1 QA server USA

    1 QA server EU

    1 DEV

    1 Maintenance copy

    11 TOTAL

  • 2,000+ small remote retail POS instances get transactionally replicated to four larger on-presises replicas, which get consolidated into one big ODS, which gets partially replicated for reporting purposes to various other scale out servers, data marts, and skunk works projects. Fairly recently we've started experimenting with scale-out replicas in Microsoft hosted Azure IaaS.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • We have multiple copies of the Production database that are used for various purposes: Development, Testing, Staging for the next release to Production, and a second testing copy. Then there are a couple of much older copies that are used for research to hold a point-in-time copy of the database.

Viewing 6 posts - 31 through 35 (of 35 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply