To celebrate the Victoria Day Holiday in Canada I drove down to the U.S.A. with 'ol Volvo Wagon (not Smart this time, since 3k of maintenance awaits it today 🙂 to present on Database Mirroring on SQL Server 2008.

Yesterdays’ meeting when well and I met some very interesting people at the Competitive Computing’s Mountain View offices in Burlington, VT. Roman Rehak helped out very much in the meeting, by not only hosting it for the PASS Vermont SQL Server User Group (thanks to MyWebGrocer.com for the Free Pizza and Drinks! btw), but asking all the right questions to enrich our understanding of this great SQL Server Feature.

Here are the updated presentation slides. I was able to setup a Synchronous Mirror, demonstrate a manual failover, and simulate high amounts of traffic with Data Generator (I’ll try SQLStress one day too, I hope).

I’m going to have to ensure I do a fresh install of Entreprise version before I can demonstrate an Automatic Failover with Witness since my version seems to have a registry problem. Both machines involved in the Partnership were SQL 2008 Entreprise…but one was a reinstall, so I am assuming the registry is still messed, and will sort that out this coming week with my first Windows 7 install on the XPS M1530.  Cannot wait for the second life of my SSD!

Roman’s great suggestion was that if we placed the Witness on a clustered server, then it would be a much optimised high-availability solution.
I will propose that for our future Mirroring Quorum setups.

Last years' talk at the Vermont User Group was given on Database Compression for those following this PASS Chapter..