Creating Users on secondary server in log shipping

Question

I have a production Server say ServerA I have setup log shipping to ServerB which is left in read-only mode. The purpose of this log shipping is to lower the load on production server for some expensive queries (painful reports).

Now if I have to create some logins using our domain accounts. I cannot do this because the secondary database is in standby mode.

I thought if I create these logins on Primary server it will be copied over to secondary server then the logs are restored there but this isnt the case.

I have done a lot of research online finding a way around to this. I found the following resources for this. I tried every method suggested in this articles but none of them seems to work.

1) Log Shipping in SQL Server 2008 R2 for set BI on replicated database

2) How to transfer logins and passwords between instances of SQL Server

3) Orphaned Users with Database Mirroring and Log Shipping

Has someone experienced the same issue? what did you do? Is there any way around for this issue? Any suggestions any pointer please.

Answer 1

Ali,

Of course I am crafty ...

Check out these articles.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.05.sqlqa.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/reedme/archive/2009/04/24/log-shipping-database-snapshots-bummer-dude.aspx

Database mirroring is a better solution since you can create a snapshot and report off that.

However, both mirroring and log shipping have the database in read only state. Therefore, you can not change the orphaned users.

The best way is to make sure your login's on both servers match. Therefore, orphans will not occur.

I your case, you might have to remove log shipping, create the login's on the DR server, drop the database, reseed the DR server with a backup and restart shipping.

In this area, I am not speaking from experience since I always used clustering with a SAN. Please test this out in a lower environment to work on any gotchas.

My upcoming project will be using Always On (with 1 primary, 1 secondary) = mirroring if synchronous or log shipping if asynchronous. But Always On allows for read only secondaries, which is nice.

Please write back on how you make out. I am curious.

Take care my friend.

J