With Log Shipping:
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
With Database Mirroring:
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 seconds
Role Change: Role change is fully automatic
Client Re-direction: Fully automatic as it uses .NET 2.0