Mirroring vs Replication

Question

How to decide whether to choose a Replication or Mirroring in SQL Server 2005 to provide data availabilty and performance at the same time.

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To be more specific

Answer 1

I don't know SQL Server 2005, but for general SQL Usage i would always prefer Replication. You have to separate reads/writes in your application (for MySQL there is MySQL Proxy which can do this in a proxy way for you), but gain a scalable system. (reads to slave(s), writes to master)

Mirroring means master-master replication which leads to concurrency/transaction issues. Even in master-master scenarios you should NEVER send write queries to different servers. Depending on your project's size, the next steps would be adding more slaves, and then add another master+its slaves for redundancy.

master --- master
  |          |
slave       slave
  |          |
slave       slave
  |          |
slave       slave

Even then you would only send write queries to one master, but in case of a failing master you could automatically promote the second master to your new write-query-target.