Use the same database or replicate it for reports and web

I would like to know if i have a web with a huge Database and throw expensive (in time)reports , the best way to do this is with one database for the web and a replicated one for reports, or only one for both, i'm worried that users can throw reports for 5 or more years because they need that information and the web crashes because of this开发者_如何学C.

Having a dedicated DB for data extraction, reporting, datawarehouse is pretty standard practice.

Your main concern should be defining the refresh rules, so that the reports can target a well defined version of the live data.

Example: every day from midnight to 2am your production DB is copied to the reporting one, so everybody can be confident that the reports are working on data refreshed till the day before.

This is just an example, your users may need/accept different ratios, maybe 1-week old data are ok, or maybe they need a refresh at each hour.

Once you have defined this requirement, you must see if this is actually doable in your case, using either a complete backup/restore, updating only the changes in the last interval, or even using mirroring... this depends on your architecture, hw resources, tools and I can't give any specifics for it.