Disaster Recovery

  • Good day,

    I want to propose a disaster recovery plan at my new work place,which way must i take less costly but efficient.mirroring,log shipping or replication?

    Thank you

  • No where near enough information. To come up with a DR plan, you need to identify the SLAs and requirements. How much data loss is tolerable? How much downtime is acceptable? Is automatic failover a requirement? Do multiple DBs need to fail as a unit? What edition and version of SQL are you using? What other things outside the DB need to be considered for DR, etc, etc.

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass
  • Thank you for the insight

  • Some of the magic phrases you want to use when talking to the business about something like this (and it is absolutely a business question, not a technical one) are RTO and RPO, Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective. The first, RTO, is how long it will take you to recover in the event of catastrophic loss. The second is, just how much data are you willing to lose in a catastrophic loss. The initial conversation for both these always results in the answer being ZERO, however, that's not realistic. You have to work with the business to get them to understand that.

    Secondarily, you can talk to them also about High Availability. This is a separate discussion from disaster recovery, although they can be somewhat related. In the HA talk, you can bring up stuff like replication, log shipping, mirroring, and, best of all, Availability Groups. Better still, this is an opportunity to start to talk about systems where HA is built in, such as Azure SQL Database.

    If you don't understand all the options on the things I've outlined... One, learn. Two, maybe you want to bring in a consultant to talk to your business. Business continuity, HA & DR, are vital concepts that are best not left to chance if you like your company and your paycheck.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • Something else to think about is what sort of disaster(s)...?

    Are you talking about someone accidentally fat-fingering a query and updating all your product costs to be the same value?  Can happen...

    Are you talking about the loss of a table?  a database?  a server?  a storage device?  your entire data center?

    Different requirements result in different recovery strategies.  You may well end up with a blend of strategies to address different problems

    Thomas Rushton
    blog: https://thelonedba.wordpress.com

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