I cannot speak for the whole legal industry but where I work a lot of people love some SharePoint. It’s like 50 Cent says, “We love SharePoint like a fat kid loves cake.” And trust me we love some cake. With this mad love of SharePoint comes great collaboration and with this great collaboration comes tons of binary files stored in a database. What does this mean to the DBA? SharePoint now consists of VLDB’s.
Hmm… How do we move the VLDB’s across the USA and keep them in sync?
With the built in features of Log Shipping, database Mirroring, Transactional Replication with SQL Server I knew it was possible to migrate the databases and keep them in-sync. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure of the best way to do this so I used the bat phone.
While some people love SharePoint I love Twitter. Twitter allows me to communicate with several great DBA’s. For example, I used #sqlhelp which is the equivalent of getting Batman on the bat phone. This time it was Brent Ozar ( Twitter | Blog) who confirmed my gut feeling that Log Shipping was the way to go.
So…. How do you do it?
The complete process I used is documented at mssqltips #2073. This tip walks you though the process of 22 steps to get the job done. I hope this tip helps out other DBA’s that need to migrate VLDB’s from one location to another location without using third party tools.
If you have any comments or suggestions please forward them along.