SQL Server full copy of database for read operations

Question

Please advise what suits my problem better. I have a highload web app hosted on the same server where SQL server is hosted. I also have SQL Service reporting running on the same server, generating user reports.

So my server basically works on top of disk read/write speed. I'm going to get another server and install there another SQL server in order to host SSRS there. So my criteria is to get as fresh data as it possible.

I've looked a couple of solution, currently I do make backup via jobs, copy it to second server and restore it there, also via jobs. But that's not the best solution.

All replication mechanism(transaction, merge, snapshot) affect publisher database by locking it's table, what is unacceptable for me.

So I wonder is there any possibility to create a replica with read only access, that would be synced periodically not affecting main db? I would put all report load to that replica and make my primary db be used only by web app.

What solution might suit my problem? As I'm not a DBA, I'd start investigating that direction. Thanks.

Answer 1

Transactional Replication is typically used to off-load reporting to another server/instance and can be near real-time in a best case scenario. The benefit of Transactional Replication is you can place different indexes on the subscriber(s) to optimize reporting. You can also choose to replicate only a portion of the data if only a subset is needed for reporting.

The only time locking occurs with Transactional Replication is when you generate a snapshot. With concurrent snapshot processing, which is the default for Transactional Replication, the shared locks are only held for a short period of time, so users are able to continue working uninterrupted. Either way, this shouldn't be an issue since you'll likely be generating the snapshot during a period of low user activity anyway.