How long to copy/replicate a database

[OakRogbak_erPine]

My company is considering purchasing MS SQL Server to run an
application on (SASIxp). I am mainly familiar with Oracle, so I was
wondering how long it would take to copy a database. Basically we have
database A and each night we want to replace database B with the
contents of A. How long would this take say if we had a 10GB database
or a 20GB database.

What would be the technique to do this nightly, the Copy Database
Wizard, Snapshot Replication, Attach & Detach...? We need to automate
this process, and the source database can be made unavailable when
this happens.

Thanks,
Roger

[Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)]

<Oa**************@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:13**************************@posting.google.c om...

My company is considering purchasing MS SQL Server to run an
application on (SASIxp). I am mainly familiar with Oracle, so I was
wondering how long it would take to copy a database. Basically we have
database A and each night we want to replace database B with the
contents of A. How long would this take say if we had a 10GB database
or a 20GB database.

Well, your maximum speed is limited by hardware. And depending on how you
move things, you may get close to that speed.

What would be the technique to do this nightly, the Copy Database
Wizard, Snapshot Replication, Attach & Detach...? We need to automate
this process, and the source database can be made unavailable when
this happens.
Probably the easiest way given you can suffer from downtime is to do a
detach, copy, attach.

In that case you're pretty much limited to hardware speeds.


Thanks,
Roger

[Erland Sommarskog]

Oa**************@yahoo.com Kill the 2 trees in email address to reply
(Oa**************@yahoo.com) writes:

My company is considering purchasing MS SQL Server to run an
application on (SASIxp). I am mainly familiar with Oracle, so I was
wondering how long it would take to copy a database. Basically we have
database A and each night we want to replace database B with the
contents of A. How long would this take say if we had a 10GB database
or a 20GB database.

What would be the technique to do this nightly, the Copy Database
Wizard, Snapshot Replication, Attach & Detach...? We need to automate
this process, and the source database can be made unavailable when
this happens.

An alternative is to use BACKUP/RESTORE. In this case, you can have
the databases available all the time.

How long it would take, depends on the hardware, but for a 10-20 GB, the
process would take something like 15-20 minutes on a decent machine. And
since you probably will backup the database anyway, only the restore
time would be extra.

Yet an alternative to consider is to apply transaction logs. Depending
on the transaction frequency, this can be a lot faster.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, so****@algonet.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp