From: Ellen K. 

I heard back from two different SQL Server MVP's that the BLOB data ARE
written to the log, i.e. I was mistaken on that point.  The fact that they
reside on separate pages is irrelevant.

So right now I'm leaning toward log shipping as our solution.  Will see
what my boss thinks about it.


On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 15:49:45 -0700, Ellen K.
 wrote in message
:

>Well, after a little more reading, I don't think clustering is going to
>be my answer.  If I correctly understood what I read, clustering means
>the clustered machines all use ONE set of data.  So it protects against
>machine failure and network failure but if the location where the data
>reside goes down for whatever reason what good are the additional boxes?
>(Our L.A. location is obviously vulnerable to earthquakes, and not so
>obviously vulnerable to terrorist attack of several nearby institutions,
>and TJ, well, it's in Mexico, nuff said.)  I think we want redundancy of
>the DATA in addition to being protected against machine failure and
>network failure.
>
>Log shipping (similar to replication but specifically designed for when
>you want a standby server, for example there are stored procedures for
>making the standby the primary etc) seems more like what I want except
>that for my recordings database it isn't going to be a solution because
>BLOB data are actually stored on their own pages, all that's in the BLOB
>field is the pointer to the location of the data, and the BLOB data per
>se are not written to the log.   I haven't seen anything about whether
>BLOB data are propagated if we go back to my original idea of
>transactional replication, that's my next piece of research.
>
>My boss agreed that using replication with the idea of changing the IP
>number of the Subscriber wouldn't work because they will be on different
>subnets, but suggested that instead of changing the IP number of the
>Subscriber, change the *applications* to point to the Subscriber instead
>of the Publisher.  On further thought it seems to me that since we're
>going with this Enterprise Service Bus thing we could have something
>that sends a message with the new location to point to, and/or have the
>connection string somewhere in the middle tier so we could change it in
>the event of a disaster, and this would be transparent to the users.
>
>Comments?

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5