Load Balancing with SQL Server What exists today to do Microsoft SQL Server Load Balancing on Windows Server and being transparent to any programmatic access. Is this built in or does a solution have to be purchased?

I'm trying to find out if there is a solution today that makes this very easy from the view point of the web servers or other database access to SQL Server.
There is no "standard" load balancing set up for MS SQL Server that you can run via a wizard.

This would be a database architecture decision and implemented at the database level not the server level. Techniques would be:


Scaling out/federating the database servers
Partitioning
Offload your reporting requirements
Perhaps replication


If anyone disagrees, then I'd like to see an article by a respected known MS SQL figure saying clustering is load balancing. The articles quoted above do not mention load balancing. For example, A Microsoftie (Chas Boyd) says it is not here.

My question to the OP would be what kind of load do you expect?

Database servers are usually IO and memory bound, so proper disk configuration (with appropriate filegroups) and as much RAM as possible will go a lot further than any solution above.

Don't forget: SQL Server 2005/Windows 2003 Enterprise 32-bit goes to 32GB RAM (of which you'd have 26-28GB data cache) and you are not limited by drive letters because of NTFS mount points. As for x64...