Differences Between Logshipping and Mirroring

Log Shipping:
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Data Transfer: T-Logs are backed up and transferred to secondary server
Transactional Consistency: All committed and un-committed are transferred
Server Limitation: Can be applied to multiple stand-by servers
Failover: Manual
Failover Duration: Can take more than 30 mins
Role Change: Role change is manual
Client Re-direction: Manual changes required

Database Mirroring:
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Data Transfer: Individual T-Log records are transferred using TCP endpoints
Transactional Consistency: Only committed transactions are transferred
Server Limitation: Can be applied to only one mirror server
Failover: Automatic
Failover Duration: Failover is fast, sometimes <3 seconds but not more than 10 sec
Role Change: Role change is fully automatic
Client Re-direction: Fully automatic as it uses .NET 2.0