Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

Chapter 19. SQL Server 2008 Log Shipping

Log shipping is an SQL Server technique that became available several releases ago. In log shipping, the database transaction log from one SQL Server is backed up and restored onto a secondary SQL Server, where it is often deployed for high-availability, reporting, and disaster-recovery scenarios. Beginning with SQL Server 2005, log shipping has been enhanced to continue to deliver business continuity and to be one of the high-availability solutions to maintain a warm standby. Using log shipping, the secondary server will be the warm standby used for failover. SQL Server 2008 adds the performance increase that is gained by compressing the backup and log files.

For many years, organizations have depended on log shipping for their business continuity, as it is a low-cost, efficient, and simple solution to deploy. It takes advantage of the transaction-log backup and restore functionalities of SQL Server. The two log-shipping SQL Servers can be located next to each other for high availability or across a distance for disaster recovery. The only distance requirement for the two SQL Servers is that they share connectivity that enables the secondary SQL Server to copy the transaction log and restore it. In this chapter, you will learn about log-shipping architecture and deployment scenarios. We will discuss how to configure log shipping and the various scenarios for switching roles between the primary and secondary servers. You will also learn ...