Finally, I have published the BizTalk Server Databases: Disaster Recovery, Troubleshooting and Best Practices whitepaper!
This was probably my craziest project ever. I originally started it during an MVP Summit around 2013 as a small, seven‑page document focused on disaster recovery. At the time, Tord Glad Nordahl kindly reviewed the initial draft. However, for various reasons, I never finished or published it.
Last year, during another MVP Summit, I decided to revive the idea. I brought the document back to life and asked the MVPs around me to review it once again. In hindsight, that may not have been my smartest decision.
They turned out to be the most demanding reviewers I have ever had. They constantly asked for more detail, more scenarios, and more practical guidance. As a result, the whitepaper grew significantly.
What started as a seven‑page document eventually became a thirty‑four‑page whitepaper, far more complete and far more valuable than I had originally planned.
📝 One-Minute Brief
This post announces the publication of a comprehensive BizTalk Server databases whitepaper covering disaster recovery, troubleshooting, monitoring, and best practices, aimed at helping administrators maintain database health and prevent performance or availability issues.
What to expect about BizTalk Server Databases: Disaster Recovery, Troubleshooting, and Best Practices whitepaper
Microsoft BizTalk Server databases and their health are very important for a successful BizTalk Server messaging environment. BizTalk Server is an extremely database-intensive platform, persisting data to disk with high frequency, and one of the main reasons for that is that one of the primary design goals of BizTalk Server is to ensure that no messages are lost. Therefore, database performance is paramount to the overall performance of any BizTalk Server solution.
There are many factors to consider when troubleshooting, maintaining, monitoring, or recovering from disasters. This paper will provide you with some important aspects to consider when working with BizTalk Server databases, and address the most common and important aspects:
- Size of databases and tables: performance degrades with the large size of BizTalk databases
- Important consideration to avoid large BizTalk Databases
- Separation of data files and log files (SQL Server disk I/O contention)
- Important consideration BizTalk SQL Settings
- Available tools for monitoring and troubleshooting
- Recovering from disaster situations (Clean up your BizTalk databases)
However, the content is highly valuable with regard to preventing a disaster or reducing its likelihood. After reading this paper, you should be prepared for any disaster, but also to prevent it from happening because being able to prevent is better than resolving.
Where can I download it?
You can download the whitepaper here:
I would like to take this opportunity also to say thanks to my amazing reviewers: Steef-Jan Wiggers, Nino Crudele, Kent Weare, Mikael Hakansson, and Salvatore Pellitteri for taking the time to review this whitepaper. And other people who were involved in making this “project” come true, like Tord Glad Nordahl, Lex Hegt, Saravana Kumar, and Sriram Hariharan.
I hope you enjoy reading this paper, and any comments or suggestions are welcome.
