Jane,

Wouldn’t clustering, log shipping, and replication also require another server? I can certainly understand that not every business would have servers just laying around, but if you are looking at HA options perhaps you could help me understand which ones do not require extra hardware?

And I did not say explicitly that mirroring was better; only that it claims to be better by offering the best of other technologies without the headaches of each. Mirroring does not require shared disks and resources like a cluster. It does not require you to ship your logs across the WAN. It does not mean you need to spend time fixing replication when it breaks.

Mirroring commits transactions on one server and then on the second server. You can either wait for the second server to respond (synchronous) or not (asynchronous) to the primary server. This reduces the load on your network, you don’t need to spend time doing backups and restores, there is no replication to break that you need to fix, and you don’t need to build a quorum of disks. What’s not to love, right?

Tell me more about why you would be considering mirroring and I can try to help you understand if it is the right tool for you to use.

Why is it so much better? It’s more expensive: you need another server. Not many business have that, so I really need a compulsive argument other than ‘the contractor who has 20-odd years experience on me says this is a Good Thing’.

Ta muchly

J