Summary

In case of system malfunctions, failures, and other errors, it is a DBA's responsibility to ensure that the database system can be recovered to its consistent state and made available as soon as possible. This chapter introduces reliability and high-availability features introduced in SQL Server 2005. You can use these features to perform reliable backups, increase system availability, and proactively detect disk I/O errors.

This chapter starts with a discussion of reliability enhancements, including mirrored backup media, use of checksums, and piecemeal and page restores. The second part of this chapter focuses on high-availability features and covers topics such as the new database mirroring and database snapshots, enhancement to existing availability solutions, online and parallel index operations, and dedicated administrator connection. Chapter 9, "Performance Analysis and Tuning," discusses performance monitoring and tuning enhancements in SQL Server 2005.