A drive on a mission-critical server is reaching capacity, and the new DBA is panicking. How do you approach a ballooning log file that won’t stop growing?  Read more...

Fundamentals of SQL Server 2012 Replication provides a hands-on introduction to SQL Server replication. The book introduces you to the technologies that make up replication, and then walks you through setting up different replication scenarios. When you've finished reading, you should be able to implement your own multi-server replication setup while following the principle of least privilege.  Read more...

There are times when you need to share tables between servers, where the table may be updated in both places. Peer-to-Peer Transactional Replication gives you the ability to create a solution. I explain the benefits and the downfalls.  Read more...

This level covers the details of SQL Server transactional and merge replication, from understanding the basic terminology and methodology of setting up replication, to describing how it works and how the basic replication processes can be monitored.   Read more...

The Subscriber is the server where all the changes that are published by replication get delivered to. Every publication needs to have at least one subscriber, but a publication can have many subscribers. This level assumes that you have followed the first three levels and that you have a publication set up, to which you can subscribe.  Read more...

The Publisher is the database where all replicated data originates. Each Publisher can have multiple publications defined within it. Each publication contains a set of articles that all need to reside in a single database. Each article corresponds to all or part of a single database object. A single database object can map to an article in more than one publication.  Read more...

In this Stairway, Sebastian will be covering the details of SQL Server transactional and merge replication, from understanding the basic terminology and methodology of setting up replication, to describing how it works and how the basic replication processes can be monitored.   Read more...

This article describes a design pattern for storing “effective dated" changes to fact tables.  Read more...

During weekend maintenance, members of the support team executed an UPDATE statement against the database on the OLTP Server. This database was a part of Transactional Replication, and once the UPDATE statement was executed the Replication procedure came to a halt with an error message. Satnam Singh decided to work on this case and try to find an efficient solution to rebuild the procedure without significant downtime.  Read more...

Learn about the distribution agent and how to identify replication bottlenecks.  Read more...

Many of my clients need to make data that lives on one server available on another server. There are many reasons for such a requirement. You might want to speed up cross-server queries by providing a local copy of the data. Or you might want to make the data available to resource intensive reporting queries without impacting the OLTP load, maybe even with an intentional delay so you're always reporting against complete days only. Finally, you might be looking to implement high availability. In all these situations, SQL Server Replication is a viable option to look at when planning for the implemen­tation of such a requirement.  Read more...

Have you ever heard this question? The database refresh has gone from 10-15 minutes to 1.5 hours. Nothing has changed on the application server and the consultant said ask the DBAs to check the database server. Where do you start to find the problem? Check out this tip to learn more.  Read more...

Your production SQL Server transactional replication just failed and the business impact is critical. How do you get replication restored in minutes?  Read more...

Vertical filtering of a large replicated table introduces the potential for unwanted transactions to be pushed to the subscriber. This article talks about how you might avoid this.  Read more...

SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a high-availability and disaster-recovery solution for you SQL Server 2012 environments. Replication has been around in SQL Server for quite some time and allows you to scale out your environment. Warwick Rudd explains how to join these technologies together.   Read more...

In this Stairway, Sebastian will be covering the details of SQL Server transactional and merge replication, from understanding the basic terminology and methodology of setting up replication, to describing how it works and how the basic replication processes can be monitored.   Read more...

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...

This paper provides a foundation for understanding data replication as well as a discussion of the criteria for selecting an appropriate replication technology.   Read more...

Microsoft IT protects against unplanned Transactional Replication outages and issues by using best practices and proactive monitoring. This results in increased stability, simplified management and improved performance of transactional replication environments.  Read more...

This article demonstrated the steps which you must follow to gracefully truncate the publisher database transaction log file by resetting replication.   Read more...