I have a production Server say ServerA I have setup log shipping to ServerB which is left in read-only mode. The purpose of this log shipping is to lower the load on production server for some expensive queries (painful reports).
Now if I have to create some logins using our domain accounts. I cannot do this because the secondary database is in standby mode.
I thought if I create these logins on Primary server it will be copied over to secondary server then the logs are restored there but this isnt the case.
I have done a lot of research online finding a way around to this. I found the following resources for this. I tried every method suggested in this articles but none of them seems to work.
1) Log Shipping in SQL Server 2008 R2 for set BI on replicated database
2) How to transfer logins and passwords between instances of SQL Server
3) Orphaned Users with Database Mirroring and Log Shipping
Has someone experienced the same issue? what did you do? Is there any way around for this issue? Any suggestions any pointer please.
Ali,
Of course I am crafty ...
Check out these articles.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.05.sqlqa.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/reedme/archive/2009/04/24/log-shipping-database-snapshots-bummer-dude.aspx
Database mirroring is a better solution since you can create a snapshot and report off that.
However, both mirroring and log shipping have the database in read only state. Therefore, you can not change the orphaned users.
The best way is to make sure your login's on both servers match. Therefore, orphans will not occur.
I your case, you might have to remove log shipping, create the login's on the DR server, drop the database, reseed the DR server with a backup and restart shipping.
In this area, I am not speaking from experience since I always used clustering with a SAN.
Please test this out in a lower environment to work on any gotchas.
My upcoming project will be using Always On (with 1 primary, 1 secondary) = mirroring if synchronous or log shipping if asynchronous. But Always On allows for read only secondaries, which is nice.
Please write back on how you make out. I am curious.
Take care my friend.
J
Related
I have a database on an SQL Server instance hosted on Azure Windows VM. There are two things I need to achieve.
Create a real-time duplicate of the database on another server. i.e. I need my database to make a copy of itself and then copy all of it's data to the duplicate at regular intervals. Let's say, 2 hours.
If my original database fails due to some reason, I need it to redirect all read/write requests to the duplicate database.
Any elaborate answer or links to any articles you deem helpful are welcome. Thank you!
You can have a high availability solution for your SQL Server databases in Azure using AlwaysOn Availability Groups or database mirroring.
Basically, you need 3 nodes for true HA. The third one can be a simple file server that will work as the witness to complete the quorum for your failover cluster. Primary and Secondary will be synchronized and in case of a failure, secondary will take over. You can also configure read requests to be split among instances.
If HA is not really that important for your use case, disaster recovery will be a cheaper solution. Check the article below for more info.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-sql-server-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-solutions/
Recently I had to implement transactional replication to have a live copy of that database on another server for reporting purposes. While configuring replication I realized that a lot of tables didn't have a primary key, so I could not publish all the tables I wanted to.
Second option was to implement merge replication but that would have added a GUID column to all the tables. Since it is a database for a vendor application and vendor has warned us to not "touch" the database structure because any change in the database structure can cause their application to break. So merge replication is not an option anymore.
I have been doing some research on other available options for me in this scenario; the only thing I could find is Log Shipping. I know it will leave my database in Read-Only mode but (to my knowledge) since this is the only option I am left with and it will be strictly used for Reporting purposes only I think I can live with this.
Can anyone suggest a better solution for this? Or is Log Shipping the only option left for me?
It is SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit DataCenter Edition.
Your other options are:
Database mirroring, and using a snapshot for read-only operations. It can be a pain to manage snapshots.
Upgrading to SQL Server 2012, and make use of Readable Secondaries in Availability Groups. This can be a pain in the wallet.
You mention log shipping but, based on your follow-up comments I don't think it's clear that, every time you restore a log to the log shipped copy, you need to kick out all of the users that may be running reports. This is because you need exclusive access to the database in order to restore the log. This is another case of "you get what you pay for" - you can log ship to Express instances, if you want to (and if your database supports it), but it's not exactly a watertight solution.
Lets say we have a application which has a database - MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle, for example.
And let's assume that we have multiple people, like db and audit administrators, who have admin access privileges to the database. Let's say one of the people modifies a record and change the audit trail(since they have admin privileges I think they could do anything to the database, but correct me if I am wrong).
Is there any other way to detect this? Since changing the audit trail will cover up the tampering of the database record.
Do any of the database vendors has a solution for this? I guess this goes under the audit log tampering detection under the Database Forensics.
When the database is sufficiently important to mandate an audit, it will probably also have a backup schedule.
One possible way (i may be wrong) would be to compare the suspect database against the backup dump; this may not be feasible if the admin/audit users are also assigned backup privileges.
The standard approach is to get dedicated server at your company or rent a virtual server from a reliable supplier (like Amazon). Make sure that credentials for your app are different from credentials to the server. Whenever user deletes a record - backend should archive it instead. This makes it difficult to tamper the records.
Backup the database. You need backups in case someone breaks bd by mistake.
Use hash chains.
I have two database servers running SQL Server 2005 Enterprise that I want to make one of them as mirror database server.
What I need is; to create an exact copy database from primary server on mirror server, so when the primary server was down, we could switch database IP on application to use mirror server.
I have examined "mirror" feature on SQL Server 2005, and based on this article:
http://aspalliance.com/1388_Database_Mirroring_in_Microsoft_SQL_Server_2005.all
The mirror database cannot be accessed directly; however snapshots of the mirror database can be taken for read only purposes. (Prerequisites no. 4)
So how it can be useful when I can't access it when primary server was down?
I've been thinking about creating a regular backup on primary server and restore it on mirror server on hourly basis, but that's quite inefficient (slow) especially if I want an exact copy (since hundreds data's are added once in minute).
Any other suggestion?
EDIT:
Maybe what I mean was a replication thing, not a mirror (thanks JP for commenting)
They are referring to the fact that you can't perform queries on the mirrored copy, but you can get around that limitation by creating a snapshot of the mirrored database. This is often done to create a read-only database copy for reporting uses. You would have full access of the mirror if the primary were to fail, but it will not failover automatically.
Log shipping is another option, which allows you to query (read-only) the standby database without having to create a snapshot.
If I understand your question correctly, you shouldn't have to do that. There are several role switching forms you can use to have your mirror take over as primary. You don't change the IP address at the application level, the cluster itself has a virtual IP address that allows access to the data at any given time (given a reasonable amount of time for the switch over to the mirror from a primary failure). The mirror stays in synch by itself. :) There are good articles here and here on clustering.
Edit: Okay, based on the comments, check out the various options for replication.
Your confusion is common - there's a lot of ways to do disaster recovery planning with SQL Server. I've recorded a 10-minute video tutorial of SQL Server disaster recovery options including log shipping, mirroring, replication and more. If you like that one, we've got a longer one at Quest called Disaster Recovery Techniques but that one requires registration.
Instead of investigating a specific technology here, what you might want to do is tell us what your needs are, and then we can help you find out what option is right for you. The videos will give you an idea of what kinds of information you need to know before selecting a particular solution.
When using only two SQL Servers, you need to do the fail-over manually. The 'backup' database will be usable after you do two things;
Disable mirroring on it
Restore the database with RECOVERY (but without a backup file, this will make the database usable).
Therefore mirroring in this manner does make scense, however it is hard to maintain;
Moving back from the backup database to the primary is a 'pain' as you have to set-up the complete mirroring again using a backup of the redundant server. This is needed to get the primary back up to speed.
My recommendation would be to get a thrid SQL Server into the picture that can act as a witness. The witness will monitor the status of the mirroring databases. Your bonus; you will get automatic failover, and will not have the fail-over (and after fail-over) issues.
If I remeber correct, the witness server can be running SQL Express so no need for the Enterprise version on all three - just the two where the actual mirroring will take place.
Let me know if you need Transact SQL for the commands to fail-over and 'anti-fail-over' in a two server scenario, and I can dig them up.
Warm Standby SQL Server/Web Server
This question might fall into the IT category but as the lead developer I must come up with a solution to integration as well as pure software issues.
We just moved our web server off site and now I would like to keep a warm standby of both the website and database (SQL 2005) on site.
What are the best practices for going about doing this with the following environment?
Offsite: our website and database (SQL 2005) are on one Windows 2003 server. There is a firewall in front of the server which makes
replication or database mirroring not an option. A vpn is also not an option.
My thoughts as a developer were to write a service which runs at the remote site to zip up and ftp the database backup to an ftp server
on site. Then another process would unzip the backup and restore it to the warm standby database here.
I assume I could do this with the web site as well.
I would be open to all ideas including third party solutions.
If you want a remote standby you probably want to look into a log shipping solution.
This article may help you out. In the past I had to develop one of these solutions for the exact same problem, writing it from scratch is not too hard. The advantage you get with log shipping is that you have the ability to restore to any point in time and you avoid shipping these big heavy full backups around and instead ship light transaction log backups, and occasionally a big backup.
You have to keep in mind that transaction log backups are useless without having both the entire sequence of transaction log backups and a full backup.
You have exactly the right idea. You could maybe write a script that would insert the names of the files that you moved into a table that your warm server could read. Your job could then just poll this table at intervals and not worry about timing.
Forget about that - just found this. Sounds like what you are setting out to do.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/customlogshipping/1201/
I've heard good things about Syncback:
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro-features.html
Thanks for the link to the article sambo99. Transaction log shipping was my original idea, but I dismissed it because the servers are not in the same domain not even in the same time zone. My only method of moving the files from point A to point B is via FTP. I am going to experiment with just shipping the transaction logs. And see if there is a way to fire off a restore job at given intervals.
www.FolderShare.com is a good tool from Microsoft. You could log ship to a local directory and then synchronize the directory to any other machine. You could also syncrhronize the website folders as well.
"Set it and forget it" type solution. Setup your SQL jobs to clear older files and you'll never have to edit anything after the initial install.
FolderShare (free, in beta) is currently limited to 10,000 files per library.
For all interested the following question also ties into my overall plan to implement log shipping:
SQL Server sp_cmdshell