In many ways, running a clustered environment
with SQL Server 2005 is no different than having a single server.
Similar to clustering, though much more complex and native to SQL, database
mirroring is a more robust feature in SQL Server 2005 that mitigates a number of risks.
Mirroring is the topic of Chapter 8.
CHAPTER 7 n CLUSTERING 194
Database Mirroring
If there??™s a crown jewel in the SQL Server feature set, database mirroring could arguably
be that jewel. An interesting combination between log shipping and clustering, database
mirroring has the potential to eliminate the impact of environmental, hardware, and
media disasters for companies that normally couldn??™t afford a hot remote standby system.
To Microsoft??™s credit, it knew upon the initial release of SQL Server 2005 that database
mirroring wasn??™t quite ready for prime time. I??™d been testing it throughout the beta
and Community Technology Preview (CTP) programs, and I personally found it to be
quite stable. Initially, SQL Server 2005 had no GUI for configuring a mirroring session,
and manual configuration was a bit difficult, if for no other reason than the number of
steps required.
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