Andrew Fryer wrote a reference post about SQL Server Redundancy earlier this month about the pros and cons of clustering and mirroring, so it’s about time I mention it here! His motivation was an internal request at Microsoft:
If there are internal Microsoft staff who don’t know when to use what, then I imagine there must still be confusion in the real world about these two approaches.
Very much so 🙂 Same principles also apply to Oracle and Sybase, except their integration with Cluster and OS is less tight (yet – probably more to come from Oracle here), and Sybase’s Replication Server doesn’t offer synchronous mirroring.