Mirroring, Snapshot Replication, Load Balancing And Other BIG Questions

You will all have to excuse my ignorance. I'm a developer who also doubles up as a development DBA. I am however not particularly knowedgeable about all the really important DBA stuff.

We've built a small BI solution using SQL Server 2000. Our problem is that our server is getting on in years (5) and doesn't really have enough disk space or grunt. We havce a number of summary cubes that we've optimised quite successfully but our billing line level cubes run to 60 million rows and, well, they're about as quick as a dead ferret. Especially given the stupid queries our data analysts keep running.

We have however proved our point. That this can be done and indeed SQL Server can do it. So we're now looking at some infrastructure spend and some new copies of SQL2005.

But i need some advice. Our user base is climbing through the roof, we originally had 10, now we have closer to 50 and at this rate it'll be a couple of hundred by the end of the year. We're using a plugin called XLCubed to deliver that data into Excel from the Analysis Server.

The OLTP database that sits behind it is fairly robust but we have a number of web based apps (mostly lookup systems) that want to use the nice shiny new accurate tables of data we have created.

So I'm looking at a fairly big server to hold the OLTP DB, this will also serve up live data to our web apps. Its worth pointing out that the source data system is a batch system that processes overnight so we load data from yesterday at 6pm each evening and process our cubes and stuff overnight. Thus the data is a couple of days out of date. Don't laugh they used to use MS Access and got one mangy data set a month so this is a massive leap forward.

I wanted to mirror the DB to another machine but I also want to have a separate Cube Server. I wondered if the cube server could use the mirror to read its data from as opposed to loading the Main Server (the mirror would be an identical box) we would also have a separate box running some of our other systems acting as the witness.

I also wonderd about exporting the Cubes onto file shares for use locally as opposed to via the server which is how they connect now.

We have been using Reporting Services and some of the queries the devs write are not exactly efficient. So I was also planning on clustering a pair of smaller servers into a reporting farm. Could I use another SQL Server to serve data up to them? Could I use a DB snapshot to copy the data required to this server? What are the time / size implications of using a snapshot and replicating it over each night?

Any suggestions for places to read up on this? I've looked at the MS marketing blurb and while its big on buzzwords its light on specifics. Like how it actually works and how you would actually configure it to do some of this and what the implications would be.

Any advice?



many thanks


Steve