??? Don??™t forget that you can use those secondary databases for reporting purposes:
While not strictly a disaster recovery tie-in, reporting is another selling point for
log shipping. You can create copies in remote offices that you can use for reporting
purposes.
Summary
Log shipping is a simple, low-cost means of achieving off-site database redundancy.
Recovery is a manual process, but with thorough documentation and practice, you can
configure recovery and redirect operations surprisingly quickly.
Sadly (for me), log shipping isn??™t used nearly enough. I??™ve dealt with tornadoes and
flooding, and a simple log-shipping configuration could have been the difference between
staying in business and filing for bankruptcy. I really do recommend considering log shipping
in your overall strategy.
Of course, there are drawbacks. Failover and failback can both be a real pain if they
aren??™t practiced, documented processes. Data loss is almost a certainty, but unlike in
other scenarios, the amount of data loss is fully identifiable. One mitigation technique
that focuses on losing as little data as possible is database clustering, which is next on
the list.
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