SharePoint and Database Mirroring
Using database mirroring with Office SharePoint Server
[Note: this whitepaper was recently updated, July, 2007]
This downloadable white paper provides information about using database mirroring in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to provide more reliability for your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server server farm. Database mirroring makes it easier and faster to recover from a failure of a database or a database server. Also the corresponding whitepaper for WSS is here:
Using database mirroring with Windows SharePoint Services
Database Mirroring Best Practices and Performance Considerations
A couple of points to keep in mind:
- SharePoint will not failover automatically. There are SQL events that could be used to build a script to automate the required failover steps.
- Mirroring can be used to "replicate" to another farm but keep in mind that can negatively impact performance since SQL will wait until the mirror responds that it has completed. Also, the mirror needs to be read only so this is not a solution for across geography replication. This is the same limitation as log shipping.
- Note that the docs recommend a "practical" limit of around 10 databases for mirroring. Depending on your specific deployment, there could be many more databases to be managed.
<updated when="Aug 21, 2007">
Database mirroring and log shipping. Which is better?
</updated>
</steve>