Mirroring or Replication ?

  • Hi all,

    i am looking for advise on any options for keeping a development server of SQL server 2000 upto date with our production version of SQL 2000?

    We do not want to use this for load balancing or anything like that and will just be used for dev. But we wuld like an updated exact replica daily.

    What would you suggest?

    thanks

  • I would advise Backup prod and Restore on dev if the size permits it.

    Straight forward and controllable.

    Johan

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  • You can't go for mirroring here as it is a feature in 2005 and also the mirror database is not avvailable for access until failover happens.

    Either go for backup/restore as someone suggested or go for replication with distribution agent running on your development machine(pull subscription).

    MJ

  • The way I've done it in the past is to use vbs scripts (scheduled task run) to copy the latest backup files from prod then a SQL job to restore once the file has been copied.

    This gives you a fully operational database ~24 hours behind live which people can play with as much as they like because every morning it gets dropped and the fresh copy restored. Numpties who store actual work in the test system lose it which is just "unlucky" on their part. That's what VSS is for.

    As other's have said, mirroring is a SQL2005 thing and the mirrored copy cannot be connected to. At all. Even to just read.

    Log shipping can be used but secondary database is read only and the moment the log ship job finds someone connected to the database while it's trying to restore it falls over. Even if it's only a QA session that someone's minimised to their desktop.

  • Replication would be a pain. Any time new tables were added to the database, you'd have to remember to add them to replication.

  • Go for transactional replication

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