Chapter 34. Using database mirroring to become a superhero!
This chapter covers how to use database mirroring not only to increase availability in the traditional sense, but also for less common situations that are not typically mentioned in the SQL Server documentation or literature. One example is using database mirroring to seamlessly upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 with a 10–15-second outage. Another example is using database mirroring to move multiple terabytes of data from one storage system to another with a 10–15-second outage. This chapter reveals these secret techniques.
SQL Server 2005 introduced database mirroring, and SQL Server 2008 enhanced it. Back in the pre-SQL Server 2005 days, you had several choices for high availability solutions with SQL Server, including failover clustering, log shipping, and replication. In many situations, database mirroring offers key advantages over all older technologies. It is simple to set up and administer, it offers fast automatic failover, it works at the database level (rather than at the instance or table level), and it can be used with commodity-level hardware.
