Database Mirroring

  • There was a discussion in my company with one group holding the view that Database Mirroring could not be deployed in production in SQL Server 2005.

    Has anybody deployed DM in production?


    Regards,

    Vani

  • Yes we have been using it succesfully in production for over a year, the warning that it was not ready was fixed since sp1

  • Yes. We are using it for the Past 6 months without any problem in SQL 2005 SP2.

  • Thank you both so much. I will give this feedback to my group. I might come back with more specific techincal questions, if I need to justify this view to the non-believers 🙂

    Thanks again


    Regards,

    Vani

  • Hi Vani,

    You should consider mirroring as another step on the SQL high availability solution. In our company, we have a clustered instance with some databases mirrored to another clustered instance.

    Cheers,

    Alejandro

    Alejandro Pelc

  • Vani (6/5/2009)


    There was a discussion in my company with one group holding the view that Database Mirroring could not be deployed in production in SQL Server 2005.

    Has anybody deployed DM in production?

    Did you ask them to give any evidence to say that DB mirroming could not be implemented on Production systems? What was their explanation to the same? I would love to hear them......

  • Alejandro,

    Thanks, that is very interesting. Could you share some pointers about specific items that we need to take care of when implemeting mirroring on a clustered environment? Any troubleshooting checklists?


    Regards,

    Vani

  • Vani (6/5/2009)


    Has anybody deployed DM in production?

    Yes. 🙂

    It's basically a poor man's clustering solution - it has good bits and some limitations. It works well in production and allows you to manually fail over to the other instance when you want to install updates, reboot the box or do anything else of that ilk. It takes a few seconds to complete the failover so it's fast enough for most business. The downside is that it disconnects everyone from the principle first so it's not something to be done in the middle of a busy afternoon*

    * The server spewing it's guts out in a hardware meltdown isn't something you'd plan so this can happen mid afternoon but it's more likely to hit home around 2am on a Sunday. Always nice.

  • Krishna Potlakayala (6/8/2009)


    Vani (6/5/2009)


    There was a discussion in my company with one group holding the view that Database Mirroring could not be deployed in production in SQL Server 2005.

    Has anybody deployed DM in production?

    Did you ask them to give any evidence to say that DB mirroming could not be implemented on Production systems? What was their explanation to the same? I would love to hear them......

    It says in Books-onLine pre sp2 that database mirroring is not supported for production (or words to this effect), this has now been updated but a lot of people still think that this is the case

  • Hi Vani,

    sorry for the late response... About mirroring a clustered database, there's no special consideration but the basic clustering plus mirroring ones. After having the two clusters up and running, just mirror the database(s) as usual.

    In our particular case, we're using the mirror between the production cluster and the UAT cluster, and there's no automatic failover on the mirror, so if the principal goes down, the users are not redirected to the UAT cluster. The idea of this is having a DR of the prod DB in UAT, so if the prod cluster goes down for any weird issue, we can use the UAT db until we bring prod back online.

    hope this helps !!

    Alejandro

    Alejandro Pelc

  • steveb (6/10/2009)


    Krishna Potlakayala (6/8/2009)


    Vani (6/5/2009)


    There was a discussion in my company with one group holding the view that Database Mirroring could not be deployed in production in SQL Server 2005.

    Has anybody deployed DM in production?

    Did you ask them to give any evidence to say that DB mirroming could not be implemented on Production systems? What was their explanation to the same? I would love to hear them......

    It says in Books-onLine pre sp2 that database mirroring is not supported for production (or words to this effect), this has now been updated but a lot of people still think that this is the case

    I believe it was RTM? But anyways its time for sp3 and more advanced 2008, so obviously its their outdated knowledge that they were not able to keep up with the updated features of SQL 2005.

  • Thanks Alejandro, that really helped.


    Regards,

    Vani

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