You setup SQL Server Replication and everything looks fine. Rows are flowing between the servers and you think you’re done.

Right? Wrong..

At some point in time, your replication jobs will stop (some replication failure, stop for maintenance, etc..). Once that happens, will they start working again?

When you setup a publication and subscription (Transactional for that matter), a few jobs are created:

• The Log Reader Agent
• The Snapshot Agent
• The Distribution Agent

The problem is that they are created with a schedule that starts them once the SQL Server service starts. If one of them stops for another reason, it won’t be started automatically:

So here’s the recommended way for scheduling replication jobs..

For the Distribution and LogReader agent jobs, do the following (you usually don’t need to do so for the Snapshot agent):

1. Double-click on the job name and choose Schedules.
2. In the Schedules screen, click on Pick:

3. Choose from the variety of options:

Once you do that, even if the jobs fail or stopped for some reason, they will be restarted. If a job is already running, it won’t be interfered or started again.

However, you should remember that in case you want to intentionally stop replication for some kind of maintenance,  you should disable the job or the schedule in order for it not to start when you don’t want it to.

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