How to optimize and estimate DB recovery times?

Question

Would like to optimize recovery time for db's after failover to passive node in high availability cluster.

Assuming full recovery model...

What are the steps to take to optimize DB recovery time for a given SQL server database?

Is there a good way to estimate how long recovery time will take for a given SQL server database?

Answer 1

What are the steps to take to optimize DB recovery time for a given SQL server database?

The best way is to upgrade to SQL Server 2019 and use Accelerated Database Recovery which provides:

• Fast and consistent database recovery

• Instantaneous transaction rollback

• Aggressive log truncation

On older versions you can configure the recovery interval to force more aggressive checkpointing of dirty pages, but in-flight transactions will still need to be rolled back during a failover. So you would also want to avoid long-running transactions during windows where you need fast failover.

Recovery time during large transactions might be optimized by temporarily switching the database to the Bulk Logged recovery model, but you'd need to ensure that the operations qualify for minimal logging.