log shipping to 2 different servers

[timscronin]

Currently we run log shipping to a standby server located at the same site as the production. We currently move the 2 most important databases every 5 minutes. Everything works fine. We are now being asked to also create a standby server at remote site (we should have a high speed connection to this site). Is it possible or has anyone tried to do log shipping to 2 different servers? Can you log ship from a prod server - to a standby server - and then from there to another stand-by server?

 

[Lezza]

We had this problem in 7.0, and 7.0's log shipping doesn't allow multiple standby servers. We wrote our own shell scripts that pick up the logs and apply them to both standby servers. When we went to SQL 2000, we heard a rumor that said it now allowed multiple servers, but since our own log shipping process worked so well, we never investigated. I will add that writing your own procedure for this gives you an added benefit in that one of our standby servers applies the logs from 12 hours back, so we can also recover from corrupted data problems, and the other applies up-to-the-minute logs which allows us to switch over immediately for a hardware outage. We always ship one set of logs from the production server and the other set from the standby server.