Great article David!

I particularly enjoyed reading about Adding a New Distributor to an existing Replication Topology.

I would be interested to know your thoughts on implementing this but for a high availability scenario.

So for example there could be One Publisher (a Read/Write server for an application) and say 8 Subscribers (Read Only Databases for an application) i.e. a typical search pool scenario. Let’s say the Distributor could not be taken down for more than a few seconds as the Publisher and Subscribers must remain within a reasonable sync time i.e. seconds.

In such a scenario I am thinking that a solution could be to create an identical Publication, that points to a new Distributor and to move the Search Pool servers in and out of rotation one at a time. In other words, drop one subscription at a time and re-create using the new Publication (that references the new Distributor). This way the application remains operational whilst the migration is being implemented.

My major concern would of course be ensuring the consistency of the data during throughout the migration process.

I would be interested to know your thoughts and whether you have worked on a scenario such as this.