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 transfering large DB's between servers

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rternier
Starting Member

44 Posts

Posted - 2009-06-01 : 17:44:05
I have 12 databases that are over 30GB in data each.

I can't shrink them because they container over 100 million rows of raw numerical data.

We are moving these databases off of our main production DB onto a new one, however they are not in the same network so transfer will be about 30 hours over FTP.

What I want to do is leave the data behind, and create the DB's fresh on the new server so the applications using that data won't be interupted. They won't have the historical data right away.

After it's all up, i'll spend the 30 hours FTPing the old data to the new server, attach the databases as backups and run a script to copy the data over.

Is that the right way of doing this?

We cannot do any data transfer between the 2 boxes as we cannot have a down time of more than 30 minutes.

Customers don't need the historical data right away, but it does need to be there.

Thanks,

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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2009-06-01 : 17:52:51
I would go down a different approach:

1. Run full backups
2. Compress the backup files to zip or rar format
3. Copy the compressed files to the destination server
4. Do transaction log backups for the next several hours
5. Uncompress the backup files
6. Restore the full backups
7. Copy and compress the tlog backups
8. Restore the tlog backups

With this approach, you wouldn't have much downtime at all. The only downtime you would need is for the final transaction log backup and then copy/restore that final file. You should be able to measure that downtime in just a few minutes.

Do the transaction log backups often enough that the file sizes are small.

By the way, 30GB databases are considered small these days.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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rternier
Starting Member

44 Posts

Posted - 2009-06-01 : 17:58:32
Will the backup and compression shrink the databases small enough to FTP between the servers? the connection will go out to the internet and then route back in.(We can't link the servers together).


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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2009-06-04 : 14:43:01
That's up to you to test, but it's usually in the 90% ballpark (that's 90% shrink, 10% of original file size).

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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"Let's begin with the premise that everything you've done up until this point is wrong."
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