High Availability & Recovery
SQL Server high availability and recovery are about more than keeping a database online. This section covers failover, backup and restore strategy, recovery testing, service continuity, and the operational decisions required to keep critical SQL Server workloads recoverable and available.
SQL Server High Availability: Define the Failure Before Choosing the Technology
A SQL Server high availability discussion can turn into a technology discussion very quickly. Someone suggests an Availability Group, someone else prefers a Failover Cluster Instance, and before long the conversation is about synchronous replicas, shared storage, listeners and automatic failover. Those may all become relevant. But at that point, ...
A Restored Database Is Not the Same as a Recovered Service
A SQL Server restore can complete successfully while the business service behind it remains unavailable. The database may return to an ONLINE state, but that status only tells us something about SQL Server itself. SQL Server restore validation therefore needs to look further: can the application connect, are the required ...