Book excerpt: This book comprehensively covers the technology, the people, the process, and the real-world best practices for planning, deploying, administering, and maintaining highly available SQL Server 2005 instances. It provides in-depth, detailed advice on what it takes to assure SQL Server high availability for businesses of any size. It covers both availability and performance, from the perspective of high availability, and addresses the crucial needs of enterprise-class, 24x7 SQL Server 2005 implementations. The book is based on real-world experience. It gives sound guidance to DBAs and system administrators on how to really get the job done.