Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 do not inherently support load balancing out of the box like most information technology experts might think. They have intrinsic tools that allow for scalability and load balancing, however, they do not have the defined load balancing functions that are commonly known among network administrators. Instead, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 comes with some tools to help with scalability and performance for your enterprise organization.

Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS)

Microsoft Clustering Services does not do scalability or load balancing in the traditional sense. MSCS is specifically for fail over incidences. If you depend highly on your database servers for internal applications, or even if you need them for web services, you want MSCS as a part of your infrastructure. MSCS can make sure applications stay functional if a database server fails. It can maintain uptime seamlessly without your users knowing anything has become an issue.

Continuous Replication

Continuous replication is great way to deliver data to reporting servers so that your clients do not use live data for their reporting. Continuous replication is perfect for users that do not need live data. Continuous replication is a great way to take load off of the main SQL server and deliver data to other servers for aged data. Using this method can bring better performance on production servers while giving your other users data that is minutes or hours old.

Federated Database Design

If you have SQL Enterprise edition then you have access to a great tool to help its performance called distributed partitioned views. This unique tool allows you to distribute open queries among multiple servers. Distributed partitioning separates many member tables across multiple servers. The different views are actually save on multiple different servers across your data farm. These different tables are then partitioned into different views for query analysis distributing the overhead to multiple servers increasing performance.

When designing your applications and network infrastructure, it is important to keep performance to a maximum. Network balancing and loading will help keep your applications at top performance, which ultimately serves your employees and your customers. It should always have a main point when considering network design especially for large networks with a high amount of requests on any SQL server. By designing great load balancing on the network, it can give your .NET applications great performance and happy customers ultimately.