Summary

The message is simple: you cannot talk about high availability without talking about backup and restore. You do not have a backup until you have done a restore. Simple principles are often overlooked and undervalued. You cannot have a highly available environment without significant risk assessment. Some riskssome of the most challenging from which you will need to recovercan be recovered only through a solid backup and recovery plan. This chapter discussed backup types, effective recovery strategies, benefits and complexities for each strategy, and how best to perform each backup strategy. To ensure an efficient recovery, you must understand the environment settings and database structures that are most conducive to the availability you are trying to achieve. For each backup type you must understand the downtime potential as well as the costs and the effects on actively processing users, in terms of both performance as well as log activity. After thorough testing, you should have a solid strategy that minimizes downtime as well as data loss.