Microsoft SQL Server is a comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today?s increasingly complex business applications. SQL Server allows companies to gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. SQL Server includes support for database mirroring and clustering.

A SQL server cluster is a collection of identically configured servers, which help distribute the workload among multiple servers. All the servers share an identical virtual server name, and it is resolved into the IP address of any of the identically configured machines by the clustering runtime. Automatic fail over clustering is also available, in which the workload of a server is transferred to another system in the event of a system failure.SQL server also supports data partitioning for distributed databases. Database mirroring, introduced in SQL Server 2005, allows creation of mirrors (or replicas) of database contents, along with transaction logs, on another instance of SQL Server, based on certain predefined triggers.

• High Availability:Ensure business continuity with the highest levels of system availability through technologies that protect your data against costly human errors and minimize disaster recovery downtime.
• Performance and Salability: Deliver an infrastructure that can grow with your business and has a proven record in handling today's large amounts of data and most critical enterprise workloads.
• Security: Provide a secure environment to address privacy and compliance requirements with built-in features that protect your data against unauthorized access.
• Manageability: Manage your infrastructure with automated diagnostics, tuning, and configuration to reduce operational costs while reducing maintenance and easily managing very large amounts of data.
• Developer Productivity: Build and deploy critical business-ready applications more quickly by improving developer productivity and reducing project life cycle times.
• Business Intelligence: Gain deeper insight into your business with integrated, comprehensive analysis and reporting for enhanced decision making.

1. Manufacturing
2. Financial services
3. Retail
4. Medicine
5. Business
6. Commerce
7. Education