ahh i see

so you mean its good to prevent someone being able to go into the reporting server and changing data where as the data should be changed in the live server

another question, does replication have to be a direct copy of the live server?

so can you change it so when a transaction is updated in the live database the information is stored in the replicated database in a different way?

to try and clarify what i mean, you might have 2 tables in the live database (linked by a foreign key perhaps) that you want to store as a single table in the replicated database, so when the replication happens it brings through the foreign key from the other table too