Question 1

What is the difference between SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery?

Accepted Answer

High availability is normally designed to reduce interruption from defined component or service failures, often within one region or operating domain. Disaster recovery prepares for a wider event such as loss of a site, platform, network or primary operating environment. The same technology can contribute to both, but the design, distance, failure assumptions, data-loss exposure and operating process differ. Pro DBA maps each control to the event it is meant to cover and avoids labelling local redundancy as a complete disaster recovery plan.

Question 2

Are SQL Server backups the same as disaster recovery?

Accepted Answer

Backups are an essential recovery control, but they are not a complete disaster recovery capability. A working plan also needs suitable infrastructure, access, encryption keys, application dependencies, network changes, priorities, decision authority, runbooks and validation. Restoring several terabytes into an unprepared environment may exceed the required recovery time even when the backups are valid. Pro DBA tests the whole route from incident decision through database and application validation, within the agreed scope.

Question 3

What do RPO and RTO mean for SQL Server?

Accepted Answer

Recovery point objective, or RPO, is the maximum targeted period of data loss after an incident. Recovery time objective, or RTO, is the targeted time to restore the agreed service. They are business requirements, not automatic guarantees produced by installing a technology. Pro DBA uses them to compare backup frequency, replication mode, infrastructure readiness, failover steps and validation effort. The final design also records assumptions, dependencies and situations in which the target may not be achievable.

Question 4

Can Always On availability groups provide SQL Server disaster recovery?

Accepted Answer

They can form part of a disaster recovery design by maintaining one or more secondary replicas, including replicas in another site or region where the platform supports it. The data-loss and failover behaviour depend on synchronous or asynchronous commit, quorum, network condition and the state of each replica. Application connection routing and operational decisions also matter. Availability groups do not replace backups, and their features differ by SQL Server edition. Pro DBA validates the full architecture and runbook rather than assessing the database replicas alone.

Question 5

Does SQL Server Standard Edition support disaster recovery?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but the available features and scale differ from Enterprise Edition. SQL Server Standard supports Basic availability groups with limitations, and other approaches such as failover cluster instances, log shipping, backup and restore or infrastructure-level recovery may be suitable. The right choice depends on database count, acceptable data loss, recovery time, read requirements, infrastructure and licensing. Pro DBA compares the supported options instead of assuming Enterprise features are available or economically justified.

Question 6

How often should a SQL Server disaster recovery plan be tested?

Accepted Answer

There is no single interval that fits every organisation. Test frequency should reflect business criticality, rate of platform change, regulatory obligations, previous findings and the cost of an unproven recovery route. Significant changes to versions, applications, networks, credentials, certificates or infrastructure should also trigger review. Pro DBA can run tabletop, technical failover, restore or broader service-recovery exercises, with the scope and customer-owned application checks agreed before the test.

Question 7

Will a SQL Server failover always avoid data loss?

Accepted Answer

No. Data-loss exposure depends on the architecture and state at the time of failure. A healthy synchronous replica may support automatic failover without committed data loss under defined conditions, while an asynchronous or lagging replica may not. Forced failover can involve data loss and should be an authorised business decision based on available evidence. Pro DBA's runbooks state the expected behaviour, approval points and validation needed before a secondary copy becomes the new production source.

Question 8

Can Pro DBA design SQL Server disaster recovery across Azure or AWS?

Accepted Answer

Yes, subject to the workload and selected services. A design may use regions, availability zones, SQL Server replication features, cloud-native backup storage or prepared recovery infrastructure. Responsibilities vary across SQL Server on virtual machines, Azure SQL services and Amazon RDS for SQL Server, so provider features must be checked against application and database requirements. Pro DBA documents the failure scenario, data path, network and identity dependencies, operating boundary, estimated recovery sequence and test method.

Question 9

What does Pro DBA provide after a disaster recovery engagement?

Accepted Answer

Deliverables can include the current-state assessment, agreed failure scenarios, target architecture, RPO and RTO mapping, configuration records, backup and replication dependencies, contact and decision matrix, failover and failback runbooks, validation checklist and test report. Findings that prevent the target from being met should be explicit. The customer may retain actions for applications, users, networks or third parties, and those actions should remain connected to the database recovery plan rather than being treated as somebody else's undocumented task.

SQL Server Disaster Recovery Designed Around RPO and RTO

When a SQL Server Recovery Plan Will Fail Under Pressure

Recover the Database Service, Not Just a Copy of the Data

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