Troubleshooting replication issues

The situation

Your scheduled replication has failed. Your subscriber databases are in an unknown state. You need to establish what changes need to be made to the subscriber databases, and then synchronize them appropriately.

Key challenges

  • Identifying the updates that need to be made.
  • Updating a number of subscriber databases in the shortest possible time, and with minimal disruption.
  • Keeping a record of the changes that have been made.

How we can solve it

  1. Use SQL Data Compare to compare the publisher database with the subscriber database for selected tables.
  2. View the results, and create a report of the differences if required.
  3. Select the records that you want to update.
  4. Save the generated synchronization script.
  5. Backup up the subscriber database.
  6. Run the synchronization script to update the subscriber database.

To learn more, take a look at our worked example.

Benefits of our solution

  • Automated process quickly and accurately identifies the differences between the databases.
  • Scripts can be re-used to repeat the updates on a number of subscriber databases.
  • Reports and scripts provide an audit trail.
  • Provides more feedback and faster implementation than troubleshooting from within SQL Server.

Case studies

Online help