New Course: “SQL Server: Transactional Replication Fundamentals”

Today Pluralsight published my new course, “SQL Server: Transactional Replication Fundamentals.” This course provides a fundamental overview of how to configure, monitor, tune and troubleshoot a SQL Server transactional replication topology. Transactional replication meets a few specific data distribution requirements that no other native SQL Server feature does out-of-the-box.  Even if you’re not a fan […]

Transactional Replication Publications and Availability Groups

Books Online documents a few scenarios regarding Replication and Availability Group interoperability.  Today I tested out the process detailed here: Configure Replication for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server) It worked as advertised and I tested this on a five replica AG topology with three synchronous replicas (including the primary) and two asynchronous replicas.  I won’t […]

Replication Extended Events, Not a Tool in your Toolbox (Yet)

There are already a number of data sources you can reference when investigating replication issues.  One data source on my wish list was to have a one-stop shop in Extended Events similar to the AlwaysOn Health Session. It turns out that SQL Server 2012 does have a few new replication related events, but don’t get […]

SQL Server Pro article–“Getting Started with Transactional Replication”

I wrote a beginner’s article for Transactional Replication which was published in the July 2012 edition of SQL Server Pro: “Getting Started with Transactional Replication” My last article with them (at the time SQL Server Magazine) was published way back in September 2002!  It was my very first published item – called “Put the Hammer […]

The Transactional Replication Multiplier Effect

This post idea was prompted by a discussion I had this week with Jonathan Kehayias about an environment that had multiple transactional replication publications defined with overlapping table articles.  In other words, a table was defined as an article in more than one publication. While I can think of some cases where you would want […]

What are the Replication Agents waiting on? Accumulating wait stats by agent session

Consider the following scenario: ·        You have Transactional Replication deployed ·        Data is flowing, but just not as fast as you would like ·        This scenario could apply to local/remote distributors and push/pull subscribers There are several different techniques we can use to narrow down where the replication performance issue is happening.  Perhaps you’ve already […]

When is the Publication Access List required?

Update: ** Make sure to check out the comments at the end of this post.  There are some interesting differences in behavior between transactional replication (pull/push subscribers) versus merge replication's behavior.  **  Yesterday I was working on implementing transactional replication with the goal of limiting the permissions each replication account ran under.  I created three […]