title: Database mirroring a live database
body: <p>I've been reading about database mirroring on SQL Server 2008 R2 / 2012 and I have a question: does it matter if the database being mirrored is live? Do I have to do anything special or different if my database is live?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT-1:</strong>  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I have a (one) database on premises that's our production database. A few hundreds transactions happens per second, and 99.999% are read operations. Our plan is to mirror this database (single database) to SQL Azure (IaaS) as a "backup" structure, if the on premises environment crash for any reason, we just point to the cloud.  </li>
  <li>I would like a zero loss, but I settle for a 5 seconds loss  </li>
  <li>Latency wont be a problem... slow running is better than no running...</li>
  <li>I have just one node and one database</li>
  </ul>