Today, database professionals must provide higher levels of data availability than ever before, as database systems are being widely used for critical applications. As service level agreements (SLAs) become stricter in terms of acceptable application downtime, administrators need tools that allow them to build robust, reliable, and recoverable systems. This includes not just tools needed for recovery when a disaster occurs, but also tools that allow continuity of service while necessary system maintenance is performed.
In response to these needs, Microsoft has implemented a comprehensive set of availability features in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, which provides a highly reliable and available platform for enterprise-class relational database solutions. SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition addresses several availability issues, enabling administrators to perform operations online, to limit the scope of any disaster, utilize unlimited virtualization and most importantly, to limit or even prevent application downtime when a disaster occurs.
