The continuity of operations during a disaster is as critical to running a business as just about anything. Somewhere, within your organisation, there is a document that provides all the technical details with respect to disaster recovery for production applications running on Microsoft SQL Server database management system - if not, this should help. The goal of this post is to clearly summarise the steps required to follow in the event of a database production system infrastructure failure.
3) Once the switch occurs to or the downtime actually happens to the DRP server, all application connections strings should to be changed to access the DRP (or automatically in the case of keep-alived style connections).
4) Disable Automatic Restore SQL Agents on the restore server.
5) Remember to disable all SQL Agent jobs on primary server, if possible.
6) Enable all maintenance and backup jobs on restore server (the new primary, until you have synched up the old primary).
Nobody has the outright desire to go through a disaster without being properly prepared. When I was asked to prepare a plan for Canada’s largest Pension Fund Institution (CDP.ca), I took it rather seriously, hence the length of this document (FULL Article Published by Simple-Talk here). We ran this through a real disaster recovery test over a weekend, and all worked out just fine (mega phew!). My goal with this is to share with you exactly how you can get your own disaster recovery plan in place, so that when the time comes at least the recovery step itself is not a disaster.
I have written a twenty pager with a full description of the disaster recovery method which is currently going through quality control, editing, et al., therefore, once that is done I shall place a link here.
For now, enjoy these critical scripts (thanks Steve, will update them soon in codebase) from a database called DBA_Tools. I am sure some of my readers have done this type of work in a different way, and I would love to hear how you prefer to setup your disaster recovery systems.