Mission-Critical Operations

Use a rolling upgrade process to upgrade database instances in a database-mirroring session.

Take advantage of write-ahead functionality on the incoming log stream on the mirror server.

Use page read-ahead capability during the undo phase to further improve performance.

Provide reporting capabilities with a database snapshot as a source for reports on the mirror server.

Enable failover support by sharing access among nodes and restarting SQL Server on a working node.

Increase scalability with support of up to 16 nodes in a single failover cluster.

Support a rolling upgrade process for servers participating in a failover-clustering configuration.

Replicate changes in near real time, while all databases also handle their primary responsibilities.

Boost scalability, availability, and processing capacity by configuring applications to use peers and to fail over to another peer.

Protect against accidental conflicts with built-in conflict detection.

Increase availability by dynamically adding a new node to an existing topology.

Provide database redundancy by using standby servers to automatically back up transaction logs.

Increase availability by providing multiple failover sites.

Reduce the load on the primary server by using a secondary server for read-only query processing.

Increase data protection by providing complete or nearly complete database redundancy in the event of a disaster or planned upgrade.

Speed up synchronization between principal and mirror databases by compressing the stream of transaction log records.

Protect against page corruption by automatically fetching the mirror version of a corrupt page.

Use mirrored backup sets to perform a concurrent backup to multiple devices and to enhance protection against media failure.

Create checksums on backup media to verify subsequent restore operations.

Detect pages that were written incompletely or from outside of SQL Server, and use online page-level restore to replace faulty pages.

Detect damaged database pages quickly, regardless of how the damage occurred.

Compare the values written to a disk with the values that are read and then automatically restore suspect pages from a partner server.

Enjoy easier setup, diagnostic, and management of failover clustering with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Monitor any subset of mirrored databases to verify and troubleshoot data flow with the Database Mirroring Monitor.

Eliminate misconfigured failover clusters by using the cluster validation tool, which includes best-practices tests.

Easily visualize and manage peer-to-peer replication topology with the Topology Viewer.

Observe the status of replication agents, thresholds, warnings, latency, and overall performance by using the Replication Monitor.

Get status and configuration data about primary and secondary servers with log-shipping reports.

Automate server administration and support complex logic to build robust administration scripts.

Take advantage of a set of cmdlets, which are commands to specify a SQL Server action containing Transact-SQL or XQuery statements.

Gain access to a server that appears to be unavailable by using the Dedicated Administrator Connection.