Back in April Steve Jones wrote up a disaster at work. Andy had one this week and wrote up the story too. Copy cat! Pretty soon everyone will be having a disaster and writing a story about it! Give these guys credit for letting you see what happens when it ALL goes bad. Disaster recovery is hard to sell and hard to do, reading the article might give you an idea that will save you some time and/or data one day.   Read more...

SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 replication is usually simple and easy to setup and work with. However there are many restrictions to ensure this, one of which is the alteration of a column which is engaged in replication. Author Paul Ibison brings us two options for altering columns.   Read more...

Replication is one of the more useful features in SQL Server and can handle a wide variety of tasks based on his configuration. SQL Server expert Andy Warren takes a look at some of the default transational replication options in this article and what they mean.   Read more...

Robyn Page delves into all the things you need to know, rather than want to know, about SQL Server replication.  Read more...

Setting up replication can be fairly easy, but deviating from the follow-the-wizard approach can be tricky. New author Claudia Rego brings us a primer on setting up transactional replication without requiring an initial snapshot.   Read more...

SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.   Read more...

Merge replication is probably not used as often as it could be, mainly because of the potential complexities of this tool. New author Satia Madimchetty brings us a great article that simplifies one part of this SQL Server feature, the conflict resolution issues.   Read more...

Replication is a great tool, but it has a number of restrictions on what you can do with replicated databases. Typically you cannot easily move a replicated database, but our own Andy Warren brings us a technique that can get around this.   Read more...

New author! Mahesh presents a solid overview of the replication architecture of SQL 2000.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 replication is the easiest so far to setup and work with. However there are some areas that you can get yourself into trouble with if you are not careful. New author Chris Rock brings us a few lessons learned in getting replication working with a remote office.   Read more...

This article discusses three common problems DBAs are likely to encounter when columns have the identity property, which is defined as an attribute of int, smallint, bigint, decimal, numeric or tinyint columns that will auto-increment their value when data is inserted. These problems are humorously referred to as the identity crisis.   Read more...

Gain a better understanding of how to develop your SQL Server Mobile applications to handle multi-user access and data synchronization with Microsoft SQL Server 2005.  Read more...

Microsoft® SQL Server™ enables third-party products to become Publishers within the SQL Server replication framework. The Replication Distributor Interface allows replication from heterogeneous databases that provide 32-bit OLE DB drivers to Subscribers running SQL Server 2000. Heterogeneous data sources include: * Oracle databases * DB2 databases * Microsoft Access databases * Other databases that comply with SQL Server ODBC or OLE DB Subscriber requirements  Read more...

When transactional replication is used for high availability purposes, such as if you want the applications to access the replicated server when the primary database server fails, one of the hurdles SQL Server database administrators face when configuring replication is tables with identity columns. In this article, I am going to discuss how to customize the replication in order to make the subscription database look identical to the publishing database, so that when there is a failure in the primary server, it is simple to fail over to the subscription database.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 replication is usually simple and easy to setup and work with. However there are many restrictions to ensure this, one of which is the alteration of a column which is engaged in replication. Author Paul Ibison brings us two options for altering columns.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 replication is a great feature, but it can cause some headaches at times. Since the use of identities is something many people take advantage of, learning to handle these in a replication scenario is critical. Author Paul Ibison has done extensive work with replication and brings us two techniques to help manage the ranges of values.   Read more...

Transactional replication is a type of replication provided by SQL Server 2000 that allows data modifications to be propagated incrementally between servers in a distributed environment.   Read more...

Learn how to achieve scalable, high-performance merge replication applications. (White Paper)  Read more...

If you allow users write access to replicated tables on the subscriber, you can run into cases where a record is inserted on the wrong server - which will result in a replication stopping error if the same primary key is later inserted on the publisher. Find out how to fix it without pushing a new snapshot.   Read more...