CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sql-serversql-server-2008-r2backupmirroringdisaster-recovery
MadOp
MadOp

Reputation: 21

SQL Server Express mirror like setup

I am trying to set up some sort of fast recovery solution for a non-for-profit volunteer project.

They have two offices across the street, and the one where their servers are located is suffering power outages, a recent one was three days long and triggered the quest for some sort of solution where we could have one server in each building and when an extended outage happens it could replace the primary one.

They are running SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, which I know doesn't include mirroring or publishing features, so I am looking for some way to come close to that.

We can afford some downtime, some manual intervention and even some data loss (meaning having to re-enter the last hour of data or so).

I've spent several hours researching, and it seems some hacky Log Shipping is the closest thing I could get, even when it would be non-supported method.

But many details remain unclear to me:

Using Log shipping strikes me as something similar to rebuilding an Exchange server from logs... Is that so?

Wouldn't it be possible to dump a full backup over night and then have incremental backups that could be used to "rebuild" the databases to a "recent" state in the backup server?

Would this be so unreliable that you would consider it not worth doing?

I am not asking for the specifics here (not yet at least) but for a pointer of whether or not I am looking at the right direction.

Among other sources these seem to be the most promising ones:

http://blog.willbeattie.net/2009/07/log-shipping-in-sql-server-express-2008.html http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/sql-server/log-shipping-without-sql-server-enterprise-edition/

PS: A SQL standard licence is out of the budget (in developing countries their cost is quite high and the org is still battling state bureaucracy to get its legal non-for-profit status, so no discounts there.)

Thanks in advance. MadOp

Edit: forgot to say that there are 3 DB involved, one of 500 MB, the other two are around 1.5 GB

Upvotes: 1

Views: 632

Answers (1)

Greg
Greg

Reputation: 4035

If you can sustain some data loss and some downtime, then yes, log shipping is a good solution. In layman's term, it's basically database backup + scheduled log backups shipped/applied to a remote server.

Now, if there are dependencies between the three databases, then you most likely will be out of sync if you ever have to revert to the DR server.

Upvotes: 1

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