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Which one to do first: Partitioning or HA?

  • April 16, 2007 at 10:34 am

    #177355

    Hi everyone,

    We are in planning/scheduling phase for some of our initiatives for Q3 & Q4. Two of our proposed projects are "High Availability" using Clustering or Mirroring and the second one is "Partitioning".

    Partioning has been proposed to help reducing the time required for backup/restore, and also performance wise we should have some gain because some of our tables are huge (growing rate of about 80GB per month...) We do have some archiving going but with that kind of growth rate...

    Anyway long story short I am the tech lead for those projects but I am not a DBA (we will get consultants to do the actual work...). I need to put some proposed timelines together and here is my question (finally!)

    -> Technically does it matter if we do one project before the other? We want to do both within the next 4-5 months but I am trying to find out in which order these 2 projects should be done. (Perhaps it's faster to do partitioning first for example...)

    Many Thanks already!

    claude

  • April 16, 2007 at 10:43 am

    #700739

    Personally, I would think that you'd want to do the partitioning first.  I think it will involve more work to accomplish successfully, then do the HA project.  I would not try both at the same time.  Making multiple changes at the same time could lead to either or both projects failing or missing deadlines.

    There is less complexity if you keep them seperate.

  • April 16, 2007 at 11:00 am

    #700746

    Agreed. I'd go for the partitioning first. It's complete seperate from the other architecture decisions and work.

    After that, clustering gives you availability and mirroring gives you redudancy. These can be done in parallel with no real impact. Clustering is the more difficult because it requires building seperate but identical servers which will require taking your system offline,blah, blah. Mirroring is a bit easier to set up since it's per database, you can mirror or not mirror as you want, and it doesn't require identical equipment like you should have in clustering.

    "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

  • April 16, 2007 at 11:29 am

    #700750

    thanks for the comments, but when you say Mirroring gives you redundancy and clustering availability... I guess Mirroring gives you availability as well since your database are redundant. Can you clarify?

    Also I thought it was more a question of doing Clustering "OR" Mirroring... is it actually recommended to implement both?

    Thanks in advance for your help

  • April 16, 2007 at 11:58 am

    #700756

    Yes, it does provide availability. The way that it was described to us when we were working with the Dell consultants on our last cluster configuration was that for high availability, clustering is the technology. For redudant storage, and the availability that offers, mirroring is the technology. MS in BOL says that mirroring is for increasing the availability of a specific database and clustering is for the availability of a server. Since you can combine the two, you get more.

    "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

  • April 16, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    #700758

    thanks

  • April 16, 2007 at 7:37 pm

    #700814

    You can achieve HA using clustering or mirroring.  It is possible to use both, I guess, if you weren't planning on shifting the databases between clustered servers.  I think I would NOT use mirrored databases between servers in the SAME cluster.  I would use mirroring to sync between two seperate clusters.

  • April 17, 2007 at 6:00 am

    #700889

    You have that 100% correct. As a matter of fact, the BOL says you can't mirror between two servers on the same cluster. Although, if you set up active/active clusters (not what I'd suggest), I'll be you could get away with it (for a little while).

    "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

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