Using DNS aliases with Database Mirroring
I recently found myself having to failover a
database mirror due to hardware issues. I was pretty horified that to do this,
one of the applications had to be resinstalled because it did not support the
failover partner parameter in the connection string. Its not the first time I
have encountered this situation with Java based apps even though it does support
the failover
partner
specification.
Unhappy with this and wanting more flexibility, i started to
implement a solution where all application database connections, connected via a
dns alias rather than a specific server name. What this enabled was a transparent
redirect of application connections just by modifying the
DNS alias.
While it does not smoke out all the nasty little
excel\access and bespoke apps that still make connections without a failover
partner. Once they are pointed to the DNS alias there are going to be no more
manual tasks to reconfigure odbc aliases or ini files
job done.....
@blakmk