I have a primary database in Amsterdam (AMDB), and a secondary in London (LNDB). I want to fail over from AMDB, to LNDB and then back again, without having to make another full backup (because the database is too large).
According to Changing Roles Betweeen Primary and Secondary Servers, and Failing Over to a Log Shipping Secondary this all looks possible. I've never done it before and I'm going to be doing it in production this weekend. (I'll be doing some test runs on non prod databases before hand.)
My question: Should I be doing anything else over and above the Microsoft documentation to ensure success? (I'm wondering if anyone else has some gotya's or extra steps they take.) I'm hoping for a reassuring answer such as "Yes this works every time we do it in production and it's cool" but will be very happy also with "No don't do that, make sure you do x/y/and z instead."
Edit: Please don't recommend I use Mirroring as the answer to this question - yes that's a great idea but it doesn't work for us because of licensing costs. We use standard edition (and this only supports Mirroring in synchronous mode). I would like to know if anyone has followed the steps in the MS documentation in prod or if there's a better alternative which an "experienced" dba would use.