Editorials

MSDB Disaster Recovery

One of the reasons I wrote about Always On Availability Groups yesterday was because I was looking for a good disaster recovery option for the MSDB database. The MSDB database retains a lot of information used by the SQL Server infrastructure systems. For example, the SQL Agent is a popular service that works with the SQL Server Engine.

The Agent provides a scheduling engine used to execute tasks on a scheduled basis. As you may know, it can execute SQL commands, SQL Server management tasks, Windows Commands, SSIS commands, and much more. The schedules and definitions of the commands to be executed are all stored in the MSDB database. Many systems represent a lot of development time creating and scheduling operations. As a result, the MSDB can be a very important database, and it is one, if used heavily, you will regret not having a fail over strategy in place.

What solutions have you found effective for Disaster Recovery when it comes to your MSDB? In a clustered environment where the database files are shared by a cluster, this is pretty straight forward. But what if you are using Always On Availability Groups? Do you have other options working for you? What if you don’t have a SAN for shared files? What do you do then?

Share your ideas with us in comments, or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.

Cheers,

Ben