Here is a weird situation we experienced with a SQL Server 2008 Database Mirroring Failover.

We have a pair of mirrored databases running in high-availability mode and both the principal and mirror showed as synchronized. As part of some maintenance I triggered a manual failover of the principal to the mirror. However after the failover the principal was now in single-user mode instead of the expected "Principal/Synchronized" state we usually get. The database had been in multi-user mode on the previous principal before this had happened. We ended up stopping all applications, restarting the SQL Server instances, and executing "ALTER DATABASE ... SET MULTI_USER" to bring the database back to the expected "Principal/Synchronized" state in a multi-user mode.

Question.

Does anyone know where SQL Server stores information about whether a database should be in single-user mode or not? I'm wondering if there is some system database or table that has this setting recorded somewhere. In particular we had an incident once with the database on the original principal (the one I was failing over to) where when trying to detach the database it was put into single-user mode. I'm wondering if that setting is cached somewhere and is the reason that SQL Server put it back into single-user mode after a failover.