You may ask yourself and others this question all the time. I have heard the question a lot. The quick answer...it depends. I think both are great, however, your situation may make one more attractive than the other.

Here's a quick list of the main benefits of each technology as well as some limitations:

• Database Mirroring benefits:
• Instantaneous synchronization of changes
• Easy setup and maintenance
• Automated failover (in High Availability Mode)
• Easy to perform failover
• Fast failover. (if no transactions are queued)
• Applications can be mirroring aware using failover partner parameter in connection string
• Database Mirroring limitations:
• Limited number of databases can be mirrored per SQL instance. (however, this number is higher than the 10 you see plastered everywhere, but really depends on your hardware)
• Mirrored database cannot be queried, backed up, or basically touched in any way (snapshot can be taken however)
• Only supports one to one server pairings
• Cannot mirror a database more than once
• Synchronous mirroring is intolerant to latency and bandwidth constraints (Asynchronous mirroring has no problems with latency or bandwidth)
• Log Shipping benefits:
• Very flexible - Independent jobs govern backup/copy/restore behavior
• Delay of restore job can protect from database corruption
• Log shipped database can be queried. (in standby mode)
• Log shipping allows multiple standby databases
• Perhaps more tolerant to latency than sychronous mirroring.
• Doesn't affect performance of primary server
• Easy setup
• Log Shipping limitations:
• No automated failover
• Cannot synchronize faster than once a minute
• Failover is more complicated than mirroring
• Harder to view status of log shipping