SQL 2005 Replication in a distributed environment

  • We have a distrubuted production environment where there are 3 linked servers on separated boxes and thus separate instances. This has a symetrical set up on the fall back side. We plan to migrate from SQL2000 to 2005. As the fall back side of the environment is on a different domain we had planned to use synonyms to set up an abstraction layer in order to mask the fully qualified names [server.dbname.owner.object_name].

    Initially, we plan to try and set up peer to peer replication from Prod to Fallback with bi-directional replication so that we could point our web application at either the leg should either we need to do some work whilst having 0% down time. Since, then another team member has been looking at mirroring?

    Just a few quick questions.

    1. Are synonyms replicated in Peer-to-Peer replication or can you specify which objects to replicate? I suppose the same goes for system owned tables? e.g linked servers?

    2. Is peer to peer the way to go is mirroring a better option? Could we invoke mirroring on the fallback side for DR purposes?

    is there anything else we should be wary of?

    Any help is greatly appreciated as i'm fairly new to all this...

    Regards

    Wes

  • In replication you can chose what objects that you need to be replicated, peer to peer replication (merge replication) is useful when you want to balance the load between your servers, for examlpe you could have half of your web servers pointing to one SQL server and the other half pointing at the other SQL server with replication between them keeping them up to date.

    This differs from mirroring, which is used to provide resiliance is case one server/database goes down. In mirroring the mirrored databse is not avialable until the master database has failed and then in this situation the previous master database is unavialbe. The advantage of mirroring is that when a witness server is used the failover can be automatic, and you can change the connection string on your application to include a failover partner to automaticaly connect to the mirror in the event of a failure.

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