Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Providing a Highly Available and Offloaded Reporting Database from a Database Mirror

If you are using database mirroring to improve your availability, you can also create a database snapshot against this mirrored database and expose the snapshot to your reporting users. Even though the mirrored database cannot be used for any access whatsoever (it is in constant restore mode), SQL Server allows a snapshot to be created against it (as shown in Figure 28.10). This is a very powerful configuration in that a database snapshot against a mirror does not impact the load of the principal server—guaranteeing high performance against the principal server. Also, when the database snapshot is isolated over to the mirror server, the performance of the reporting ...