Question : Log Shipping Recovery Procedure

Hi,

I have just configured log shipping from UK to Syd. Appears to be working fine. Logs are being sent across to secondary server share and applying them to the db.

My question now comes in regards to recovery test scenario. If I pull the plug on the primary server, I understand that I need to run the following command to get the secondary server online


restore database {db name}
with recovery

The problem is we now have all users  (once we manually direct all traffic to UK) connecting to the UK, we would obviously want to bring up the primary and have that as the source server again and the UK db as the secondary.

What are the procedures to do this with NO disruption? The problem I foresee is that copying the backup of the dabatase across to Syd will take at least a day, in which time the db will become obselete as records would have been updated on the UK server by then.

What are your opinions? Or should I disregard Log-shipping altogether and look towards mirroring?

Answer : Log Shipping Recovery Procedure

You will always have to take an outage to swap over, unless you used database mirroring. This will enable you to supply both databases in your connection strings so in the event of a failover everything is seamless including the fail-back.

The process above should work, however I would be inclined to alter it to the following:


1. Primary stores tlogs in a share on the secondary server that as part of "normal" log shipping, it used to collate the latest updates and restores them into its DB.

2. When Primary goes down, I must go to the secondary and do the following:

restore database {db name}
with recovery

3. Now do a restore on the "downed" primary from the last backup of secondary, and setup log shipping from the secondary server (which is now live) to the primary. Once you have confirmed that the primary is OK, restart primary as per step #2.

It does mean shipping the whole DB backup over the line, and having users work against the remote DB but this is during DR invocation, so speed will be the last thing on users minds.