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I am DBA of a big online retail company. I am responsible for the availability of the company’s database. The size of this database is 28GB, and it handles an average of 120 transactions every minute. my main concern is to minimize the time required to restore the database in case of a failure.

Describe the backup strategy that you will use.

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"describe the backup strategy that you will use." You mean you're the DBA or we're the DBA? The wording sounds kind of like it's from a third-party than yourself. – Bart Silverstrim Jan 11 '11 at 19:22
Well for a start you don't think about just "backup strategy" to support a database that large and heavily used, you need to bake in resiliency from day one of the design. Rather than trying to make the time to backup one database as small as possible, you perhaps might start by deciding how long it can be offline for in a disaster and work backwards from that. – DJ Pon3 Jan 11 '11 at 19:25
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Homework question? – Chris S♦ Jan 11 '11 at 19:26
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Sounds like homework to me. If the OP were actually the DBA of a big online retail comany he would probably already know the answer. – joeqwerty Jan 11 '11 at 19:35
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@Chopper3, buying something with user ";drop *; might be more interesting. – Chris S♦ Jan 12 '11 at 14:19
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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

My strategy would include:

  • Implementing a Active-Passive Cluster
  • Bare Metal Recovery Backups
  • A warm-site spare if downtime costs justified it
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Seems like you'd also want to just backup the DB. So you could do a DB level restore as well as file level restore, if you needed to. – JamesBarnett Jan 11 '11 at 19:51
@James, the answer was intentionally as vague/non-comprehensive as the question. But a good point none the less. – Chris S♦ Jan 11 '11 at 19:59
Bare Metal Recovery should imply backups - otherwise, you don't have anything to recover from. That said, it's a very good point that HA and DR are not backups. – mfinni Jan 11 '11 at 20:06
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up vote 2 down vote

Consider Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager and maybe some training in this, or other, area.

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What OS is the database running on...? – Bart Silverstrim Jan 11 '11 at 19:21
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