David.Poole (3/31/2010)
No offence taken.We have four production distributors two of which are virtual servers.
We put roughly 24 billion transactions through them each day. We have spiked up to 370 billion transactions but this was exceptional.
On the subject of whether this works with SQL2000 distributors the short answer is "I don't know". Some of of publishers are SQL2000 but as the distributors have to be the highest version of SQL that are acting as publishers none of our distributors are SQL2000.
Not sure if that's 24 billion per distributor or total, but either way that's a LOT of transactions to push through! Fair to say that your case is the exception to the norm? I think that while multiple distribution DBs may solve this kind of problem for the typical shop that has < 50 million transactions per day one distribution DB per publication as a standard practice is a bit excessive.
My point isn't to knock your article or to say you're wrong - but to try and put some better idea in place of when it's appropriate to consider multiple DBs as a solution to latency\performance issues.
Just curious - have you looking into replicating stored procedure execution to cut down on the transaction volume?