Replication

PBM, Replication and Stored Procedure Names

One of the things that Policy Based management is really good at is making sure that people don't create stored procedures that start with "sp_".  However when the server that you are deploying the policies to is also being used for SQL Server replication this can get a little more complex seeing...

The process could not execute ‘sp_replcmds’ on …

When setting up SQL Server replication you might see an error message from the Transactional Replication Log Reader Agent which reads like the following.

Error messages:

• The process could not execute 'sp_replcmds' on ''. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, Error number:...

SQL Server Replication and DR

Every once and a while people ask me if they should use SQL Server Replication to get data to a DR site.  And typically to them my answer is "probably not".  The reason that I say that is for a couple of reasons. 1. If there are triggers on your tables, replication doesn't have a way to ensure...

Init Replication From Backup

One of the great features with SQL Replication is the ability to initialize a subscription from backup instead of from a snapshot.  The official use for this is to take a database backup and restore it to a subscriber then replicate any additional changes to the backup. However this technique...

Working with replication snapshots to large to fit on your distributor

I ran across an interesting problem the other day.  I was setting up replication for a couple of VERY large tables.  These two tables between there are about 553 Gigs in size.  There isn't enough room on the distributor, and there is a slow link between the distribution server and the...

There’s a little something to keep in mind when restoring a SQL replication publisher

So the other day I had to restore the SQL Server replication publisher.  When I restored it I made sure to use the KEEP_REPLICATION option on the restore (also available in the SSMS UI) so replication should come back online.  However when I restarted the log reader I the following error...

What is faster SAN or DAS (local disk), and most importantly why?

So here's an answer to the great myth of SAN, it isn't always going to be faster than local disk (or DAS, JBOD, etc.).  The reason for this is actually pretty straight forward. Local disk is cheap.  That's the reason in a nut shell.  Let me see if I can't explain in a little more...

If you see your replication log reader slow down for no reason, here’s some stuff to look at.

So a while back we were seeing some very strange behavior with our SQL Replication.  Every once and a while for no apparent reason the log reader would just slow down the pulling of records from a single publisher database.  Our replication was setup with a single publisher, and a single...

Calculating fibre latency correctly is a must when trying to deturmin storage performance numbers.

Latency on a fiber channel network isn't normally something you worry about.  But something that you need to remember is that every meter of fiber optic cable that your data has to travel through takes time.  Every fiber channel switch that you have to go through adds more latency. When you...

Using Service Broker instead of Replication

During my SQL Service Broker sessions I talk about using SQL Service Broker as a replacement for SQL Replication.  But I've never really documented how to do this other than bits and pieces here and there.  So here I'm going to try and spell out how I put a system like this together for an auto...