Publish a subscriber?

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Publish a subscriber?

Y.B.

SSChampion

Points: 11642
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May 15, 2015 at 7:23 am

#318228

Possible stupid question here guys so sorry in advance.
I had a person from systems approach me and ask if it was possible to setup replication where a DB was both a subscriber and a publisher. My first instinct was to say no but I told him I'd at least look into it. While I can't seem to find any documentation that supports it, I also can't seem to find anything that says you can't.
FYI - The reason this even came up was because of a discussion on migration strategies. The whole idea is to be able to take our time building out several servers that would be subscribers to a newly upgraded server while still maintaining up to date data.
i.e. Old Server - Main (publisher) -> New Server - Main (subscriber/publisher) -> App Servers (subscriber)
Once all App Servers are up and running we shutdown the Old Server, switch over DNS for the New Server and App Servers.
The main issue here of course is the anxiety of having any kind of lengthy downtime during the process.
Keep in mind this is not my plan, I'm going to build a test environment and do a dry run to get an idea of how long it would take to initialize the subscribers once the publisher is moved over. However, considering the organizations concerns and the size of the db (~300GB) I at least thought it was worth looking into.
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Gail Shaw SSC Guru Points: 1004504 More actions · Answer 1

It's possible. If you want to research, the term used for this scenario is 'republishing'

However, if you want to migrate, database mirroring or log shipping may be easier to use. It's possible to publish from mirrored pair though there are a pile of extra config steps. see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151799.aspx

Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

We walk in the dark places no others will enter
We stand on the bridge and no one may pass

Y.B. SSChampion Points: 11642 More actions · Answer 2

GilaMonster (5/15/2015)
It's possible. If you want to research, the term used for this scenario is 'republishing'

Thanks Gila...talk about much improved search results when you know what the actual term is called. :w00t:

SELECT quote FROM brain WHERE original = 1
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