Setting up a secondary database server

Redundancy is an amazing thing. If a primary server fails for some reason, you can keep your applications running by having a secondary database server available in case the original meets its demise. Of course, you can always create regular backups of your database servers and restore if necessary, but it’s very hard to keep up with databases that are always changing, so backups have a tendency to become stale quite fast. A secondary database server enables you to have a copy that is always up to date. This doesn’t mean that you no longer need backups, but it does give you another option for recovery when faced with a problem.

The industry is moving away from terms like “Master” and “Slave” to describe a primary and secondary server. In this chapter and moving forward, we will use the terms “Primary” and “Secondary” to describe the relationship of one main database server...