Load balance

Have a look at peer-to-peer replication. It will give you the scale out
performance you need. However it will not do the failover you are looking
for. For this you need clustering, or data mirroring. If you need to have
some processing done on one node, and then farm out other processing to
different nodes, you might be able to use DPVs, service broker, or merge
replication for this.

It really depends on your requirements.

--
Hilary Cotter
Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html

Looking for a FAQ on Indexing Services/SQL FTS
http://www.indexserverfaq.com

"Casper Hornstrup" wrote in message
news:OhyqXxbyGHA.1300@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Hi.
>
> My application is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. Most of my
> data-processing happen on the SQL Server (in two stored procedures written
> in C#) - the webserver don't do much in this setup. I'm investigating ways
> to have load balancing of the data-processing accross multiple (physical)
> SQL Servers in addition to having failover support in case one SQL Server
> does fail. Do I need to design my application specifically to support
> distributed processing or can SQL Server 2005 do this transparently? What
> options do I have?
>
> Regards,
> Casper
>
>

To load balance the processing, you would want to look at Service Broker
since you can create a single queue and then have multiple brokers handle
the processing requests.

However, you need to take a look into Database Mirroring if you want to be
redundant as well as fault tolerant since Database Mirroring will
transparently fail over the broker queues.

--
Mike Hotek
MHS Enterprises, Inc
http://www.mssqlserver.com


"Casper Hornstrup" wrote in message
news:OhyqXxbyGHA.1300@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Hi.
>
> My application is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. Most of my
> data-processing happen on the SQL Server (in two stored procedures written
> in C#) - the webserver don't do much in this setup. I'm investigating ways
> to have load balancing of the data-processing accross multiple (physical)
> SQL Servers in addition to having failover support in case one SQL Server
> does fail. Do I need to design my application specifically to support
> distributed processing or can SQL Server 2005 do this transparently? What
> options do I have?
>
> Regards,
> Casper
>
>