New SQL Skills I have learned from jobs - Part 2

This is a continuation of New SQL Skills I have learned from jobs - Part 1

High Availability Features - Mirroring and Log Shipping

• Mirroring is a easy-to-setup high availability feature, the SSMS GUI makes it easy to setup as well
• The Restore and manual Failover is the difficult part, especially for the front end application
• Log Shipping is even better than Database Mirroring as it provides means to have a warm standby SQL Server with couple clicks and a network share

XML/XQuery

• I was right to fear the powerfulness of the XML language
• In its defense, XML provides means to store free-form data inside the database (i.e. you can consider XML a database inside a database column)
• However, performances greatly suffer compared to RDBMS structures and manipulation is not as straightforward (finding syntax alone was a challenge - .modify, .value, .query, .exist, .node etc...)