Chances are the data stored in your database are of critical business importance. Employee data, customer data, history and trending, basically all of the information that composes your organization. Therefore, it’s critical to be able to recover that data in the case of device failure or other disaster scenario.
Because of their ability to be used in a geographic redundancy configuration, two contenders for the task come to mind: transactional/snapshot replication and log shipping. Let’s see if we can narrow that choice down with a little critical comparison.
Price
Both solutions will require an additional SQL Server instance to act as a publisher and another SQL Server instance to house the standby database. Replication requires that your servers running the publishing and distribution roles have to run SQL Server Standard Edition 2008 or better. The server holding the subscriber database can use any edition of SQL Server 2008 including the free Express edition. Log shipping can work with SQL Server Web Edition 2008 licensing on each end.
Winner: Log shipping, running Web Edition SQL Server.
Flexibility
Replication is more granular than log shipping, in that you can specify certain tables, columns, or filtered ranges to replicate. This amount of flexibility can help you minimize the overhead consumption of resources that replicating data can consume, if for example, the only data worth protecting are some records from certain tables.
