Thanks for the reply, Michael.

I had trouble getting any feedback or advice regarding this topic on any of the forums I read, so eventually I just tried some things to see what would happen (using QA systems first, of course).

After a few successful experiments in the QA environment, I set up the server which hosts the Reporting database as its own distributor, and used transactional replication to replicate the subset of the data from there to the AdHocReporting database, which is on a different server/VM. I set that up as a pull subscription as well.

So data flows like OLTP -> Reporting -> AdHocReporting (all one way).

That's been working fine.

The only hitch (for me) was that I need to transform the data in various small ways as it is replicated from Reporting to AdHocReporting, so I needed to replicate using stored procedures instead of straight SQL statements, which I hadn't done before. But a couple of hours in BOL and some more experimentation sorted that out nicely. 🙂