Microsoft® SQL Server High Availability

Alternate Ways to Achieve High Availability

Up to this point, you have seen several Microsoft-based solutions that can provide varying degrees of high availability. Some, like SQL clustering, are highly transparent to the end-user. More often than not, the end-user never knows that a failure has even occurred. Other HA options such as log shipping and data replication have small amounts of non-transparency that require an end-user to reestablish the database connection that their application requires via some type of manual intervention. Not so bad, and this can be done extremely quickly, again minimizing unavailability. These techniques heavily leverage fault tolerant, shared disk management and clustered servers (SQL clustering/MSCS) and also ...