Maintenance window and recovery for a large database

Question

One of our teams is developing a database that will be somewhat large (~500GB) and grow from there (I know 500 Gigs may seem small to many of you, but it will be one of the larger databases in our shop). One of the issues they are grappling with is backing up and restoring the database. Basically, the database will have several "data" tables and one table used for storing images / documents. We need to accomplish the following:

• Be able to quickly backup and restore only the data tables (sans images) to our test server for debugging and testing purposes.
• In the event of a catastrophic database failure, restore the data tables only to get most of the application up and running ASAP. Then, restore the images table when possible.
• Backup the database within the allotted nightly time window (a few hours).

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to accomplish the first two goals while still having the images stored in the same database? If so, would we use filegroups, filestream, or something else?
2. How do other shops backup their databases in a reasonable time window while maintaining high availability? Do you replicate to a second server and backup from there?

Answer 1

We have dealt with similar issues. We are a $2.5B solar manufacturing company and disaster recovery is critical for us, as well as keeping our databases backed up. Our main database is our plant floor production database. We decided to strip this database to the absolutely essential data needed to maintain production, and move other data off into its own database. This has allowed us high availability and reasonable backup/restore times.

In your case, is it really necessary to store images in the same database as your other data? I suspect it's not, and is just a case of making some issues easier to deal with. I think separate file groups would also help your problem. But you might want to seriously reconsider whether everything needs to be in a single DB.