Summary

As you saw in this chapter, careful design of the VLDB is crucial to the success of your installation. The VLDB needs to be designed not only for performance, as is often the case, but with recovery in mind as well. With each design step, you must ask yourself, "How will this affect my ability to back up and recover data?" and "Could this adversely affect performance?" It is comforting to know that many of the steps taken to accommodate VLDBs, such as the use of multiple filegroups, if planned correctly, can solve both performance and backup issues.

As well as the considerations for VLDBs, another aspect of the administrator's job in large or geographically dispersed environments is transferring data. The following chapter, "Data Replication," deals with SQL Server's replication feature, a powerful tool for transferring and updating data on remote servers.