Will Beattie's Blog

When you entrust your Applications and Data to the Cloud Based Service Providers such as GoGrid and Amazon EC2 it becomes absolutely critical to employ a strict Disaster Recovery strategy. As part of of our strategy it was imperative that we have a failover for our SQL Server. The only problem was that SQL Server Express 2008 doesn’t support Log Shipping. Well technically it does but SQL Server Express does not have SQL Server Agent. Now I’m a big fan of SQL Server, but when it comes to doing something a bit more complicated the Express editions limitations become a bit of a problem, that’s why it’s time to find creative solutions. To set up Log Shipping the first step is to Backup your database and then Restore it on another instance making sure set the Recovery state as “RESTORE WITH STANDBY”. See below To get this going you’ll need three stored procedures, one in the Master database and two in the slave database. Now when you are trying to do this across Network...

style="" > So recently I got the chance to deploy my first application to Amazon EC2.   I've got to say after a little bit of trial and error I think the service is pretty amazing and is definetly the future of web hosting and you sure can't beat the price US $0.125 / Hour which is essentially US $90 / month. Bandwidth between S3 and your Ec2 instance costs nothing so is very attractive for Media Transcoding and other such tasks. The requirements were as follows: .NET 3.5 SP1 ASP.NET MVC Beta SQL Server Express 2008 with Advanced Services IIS 6.0 Velocity Ideally I would want to host the Application on a Windows Server 2008 instance so that I could leverage the features of IIS 7.0 and also have a dedicated SQL Server 2008 instance, but unfortunately Amazon does not support this yet and it's unclear when this will happen so I had to use a makeshift approach. To manage your instances you can and should use th...