Chapter 8. Reliability and High Availability in the Database Engine

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Reliability Enhancements

• Availability Enhancements

The term reliability refers to a system's support for maintaining stability and integrity. High availability can be thought of as the ability of a system to continue serving client connections in the event of a hardware, software, or system failure. A highly available system is almost always operational and accessible to clients.

Reliability and availability are two important characteristics that define the level of quality of service offered by a database system. This chapter introduces SQL Server 2005 database engine features that make database solutions reliable and highly available.