NLB and SQL2005

Hi,
early on in SQL2005 (Yukon's) life, there was talk for Network Load
Balancing support.
Now that it's (more or less) out, the documentation makes no mention of
support for NLB.
There's talk of clusters, mirroring and replication and while mirroring
seems to come close, it's still and active/passive configuration (with the
addition of a watcher!).
Hopefully this is just buried in the docs somewhere on the install CD (I'm
waiting for the Dec MSDN DVDs, which presumably will include SQL2005 RTM),
but I'd have thought it would be online somewhere.
Anyone spotted it?
Thanks
CraigThere is no "NLB" or other form of transparent SQL scale-out in SQL Server
2005 (other than the Distributed Partitioned Views carried over from SQL
Server 2000). Mirroring does allow the mirror copy to be accessed read-only
for reporting. And there is a shared read-only reporting database feature.
In some cases those address the need for scale-out.
There is the notion of a Service-Oriented Database Architecture (SODA) in
SQL Server 2005 that can be used to achieve scale-out. It is transparent at
the level of a service interface, not at the level of SQL. It isn't
explicitly talked about in BOL. I wrote a white paper about it a year ago,
but haven't seen Microsoft publish it yet. It was supposed to be available
at launch. Dave Campbell has given presentations on it, at launch and I
believe also at PDC (and perhaps PASS).
Hal Berenson, President
PredictableIT, LLC
www.predictableit.com
"Craig Humphrey" <CraigHumphreyHatesSpam@.newsgroup.nospam> wrote in message
news:uWpmgmX6FHA.3684@.TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> early on in SQL2005 (Yukon's) life, there was talk for Network Load
> Balancing support.
> Now that it's (more or less) out, the documentation makes no mention of
> support for NLB.
> There's talk of clusters, mirroring and replication and while mirroring
> seems to come close, it's still and active/passive configuration (with the
> addition of a watcher!).
> Hopefully this is just buried in the docs somewhere on the install CD (I'm
> waiting for the Dec MSDN DVDs, which presumably will include SQL2005 RTM),
> but I'd have thought it would be online somewhere.
> Anyone spotted it?
> Thanks
> Craig
>|||In addition to Hal's comments:
For mirroring, you will probably be able to define a database snapshot of a
mirrored database and
use that snapshot as a read-only database. However, you will work against a
snapshot which will be
up to as old as the interval for creating the snapshots.
Also, you can have several database instances accessing the same read-only d
ata using the SSB
thinking: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=910378
Tibor Karaszi, SQL Server MVP
http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/default.asp
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com/
Blog: http://solidqualitylearning.com/blogs/tibor/
"Craig Humphrey" <CraigHumphreyHatesSpam@.newsgroup.nospam> wrote in message
news:uWpmgmX6FHA.3684@.TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> early on in SQL2005 (Yukon's) life, there was talk for Network Load Balanc
ing support.
> Now that it's (more or less) out, the documentation makes no mention of su
pport for NLB.
> There's talk of clusters, mirroring and replication and while mirroring se
ems to come close, it's
> still and active/passive configuration (with the addition of a watcher!).
> Hopefully this is just buried in the docs somewhere on the install CD (I'm
waiting for the Dec
> MSDN DVDs, which presumably will include SQL2005 RTM), but I'd have though
t it would be online
> somewhere.
> Anyone spotted it?
> Thanks
> Craig
>