After spending some time looking at SQL Server 2012 CTP3, it appears as if Transactional Publication with Updatable Subscriptions will officially be removed in SQL Server 2012.  According to Books Online, Microsoft is recommending that users switch to Peer-to-Peer Replication instead.  This is a shame considering Peer-to-Peer is an… Read more

After spending some time looking at SQL Server 2012 CTP3, it appears as if Transactional Publication with Updatable Subscriptions will officially be deprecated in SQL Server 2012.  According to Books Online, Microsoft is recommending that users switch to Peer-to-Peer Replication instead.  This is a shame considering Peer-to-Peer is an… Read more

There's nothing more I love than free food and SQL Server, no joke.  I take my free food and SQL Server very seriously and you should too. Fortunately for me, the folks at PASS know the way to my heart.  It seems as if they've tailored a day of free… Read more

To troubleshoot replication agent failures, replication agent profiles can be configured to output verbose agent logs to a text file.  All replication agents contain the parameters -Output output_path_and_file_name and -OutputVerboseLevel [0|1|2], which when specified, output the agent log to the file output_path_and_file_name and will contain varying degrees of information… Read more

Did you know a snapshot can be applied using the Distribution and Merge Agent –AltSnapshotFolder parameter?  This means that after generating a snapshot, it can be copied to Subscribers manually using removable media for instance, and applied locally.  This can be useful with large snapshots and when replicating over slow,… Read more

When administering Merge Replication, sometimes we need to mark foreign key constraints NOT FOR REPLICATION.  In some cases, we might require replication agent activity to be treated differently from user activity since we cannot guarantee the order of changes that are replicated.  To be more specific, sometimes parent and child… Read more

Brad McGehee over at SQL Aloha posted his July Question: What Do You Think are the Most Common DBA Pain Points and it got me thinking about my DBA career and some of the pain points I’ve experienced with SQL Server Replication.

One of the biggest problems I face is… Read more

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Have you made the mistake of dropping your distribution database like this?

If so, remember not to do this ever again.  Disabling publishing and distribution involves more than just dropping the distribution database.  The distribution database in SQL Server requires special attention and dropping it in this fashion can wreak… Read more

One caveat that’s worth mentioning is replicating the XML data type in SQL Server using Merge Replication.  Sometimes, when replicating a table that contains a column of type XML via a Merge Publication, the XML column data in updated rows sent from Publisher to Subscriber, and vice-versa, arrive at the… Read more

You may have noticed when you setup a merge pull subscription using the New Subscription Wizard in SSMS that you weren’t given the opportunity to give your subscription a description.  This is unfortunate because subscription descriptions are displayed in the Friendly Name column in Replication Monitor and give you a… Read more

Hi everyone.  Welcome to my new blog.  I’m still in the building stages here so things may seem a little uneventful at the moment.  I’ll be polishing this up as I go.  Interested in what type of content I’ll be providing to you here at SQLREPL?  Check out the About Read more