Disaster Recovery Strategies for SQL Server

"Hope is not a strategy" - Google SRE Team motto

Being able to recover our data in the event of an outage is a (if not the most) critical aspect of managing SQL Server. But how do we plan for the worst? What technologies are available to us? And how do we implement a disaster recovery strategy when the worst has just occurred?

Join Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Andrew Pruski, in this session to delve into SQL Server disaster recovery strategies.

We'll start by defining the difference between high availability and disaster recovery. They are often combined together but they are different, more like two sides of the same coin and that affects our choices when picking a technology to implement.

But before we start to implement any DR technologies we need to define a few things: -
- What is the maximum amount of data that we can afford to lose? (RPO)
- How long do we have to recover our SQL Server instances? (RTO)
- Where is our DR site located? Is it in a remote data centre or in the Cloud?

Then we'll look at the different technologies available to us in SQL Server, how can they help us define our disaster recovery strategy? Each option has a different implementation and we'll look at: -
- Backup/Restore strategies
- Log Shipping
- Mirroring
- Always On Availability Groups

After we have defined the technology we'll look at how to test our disaster recovery plan. We'll cover: -
- Alerting, when do we need to push the big red button?
- Enactment procedure, who will initiate the DR fail over?
- Fail back, how do we get back to our main production environment?

This session is for anyone who works with data and wants to learn more about how to implement a resilient disaster recovery strategy.