SQL Server
I recently saw a great movie called Moon starring Sam Rockwell and directed by Duncan Jones. It raises many issues revolving around human cloning in the future of the Earth (and the Moon). Thumbs up from here. But what if you want to clone your Reporting Services configuration? Not so controversial prehaps… Backing up is easy. Backups run without stopping the users doing their work. It’s the restoring that’s the difficult piece and needs to be practiced. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. That’s the mantra. We need to utilise the fire-drill mentality so that when the real disaster happens, we just follow the checklist to get things back up and running. Reporting Services is a web-based database application so is somewhat complex to restore. You need to follow the procedures outlined in Books Online. Of course, we need to stop reporting services, stop the web services and restrict access to the report server databases. The ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB databases can then be restored. The web services can then be started and the configuration restored. The SSRS configuration files need to then be restored and the Reporting Services can be started again. Finally, the SSRS encryption keys can be restored. Everything needs to be done in the right sequence. All that needs to be done now is to test that reports can be rendered correctly and then allow multi-user access to the databases. We need to practice this by creating a clone on another server so that when the real disaster happens we can restore the application with confidence, without surprises. We’ll leave the surprises to the movies, right? Check it out… cheers Brian
