The SQL Server 2000 High Availability Planning Guide helps database designers and systems engineers design data centers that can achieve the level of availability needed for particular business environments. This guide discusses each barrier to achieving a highly available data center and analyzes the solutions to each of these barriers. The importance of using a combination of best practices, database backups, redundant components, and redundant servers is emphasized as the key to ensuring high availability.

What this guide covers:

• Best practices to prevent downtime
• Using backup to recover from disaster
• Using hardware redundancy to prevent downtime
• Using redundancy to minimize downtime

Patterns & practices contains specific recommendations illustrating how to design, build, deploy, and operate architecturally sound solutions to challenging business and technical scenarios. The technical guidance is reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineering teams, consultants, and Product Support Services, and by partners and customers.

Patterns & Practices are:

• Proven: Based on field experience
• Authoritative: Offers the best advice available
• Accurate: Technically validated and tested
• Actionable: Provides the steps to success
• Relevant: Addresses real world problems

Contents:

• Introduction to High Availability
• Overcoming Barriers to High Availability
• Recovering a Data Center by Using Database Backups
• Preventing Downtime by Using Redundant Components
• Minimizing Downtime by Using Redundant Servers