Advice on a database Replication

Hi,

I.m trying to find the best practice for my solution.

This is the situation.

My application has two databases and 2 client interface. One with a windows forms having a database (sql server 2000) running in an office (on a static IP but on a slow connection). the second one is an web application running on the net with an online database. Both these databases have to have same information. Users can add records to both databases independently but these databases should be synchronize at a point. I hope the situation is cleare. Is there a standard way of doing this. If some one knows good article of how this can be done pls forward it to me.

Many thanks.

-VJ

You can look at Merge Replication, it can handle changes at both ends, as well as handle conflicts if necessary. How many changes per sec or minute do you expect at both ends?|||

Hi Greg,

Yes I was reading on merge replication. there can be about 200 -300 changes on the office side per day. And only about 50 changes from the web side. My only worry is the slow connection from the office end but it can run over night.

By the way whne u have created a replication can reverse it back as I created a replication and I need to change the tables. It's not very easy to do that while having the replication.

Thank you.

-VJ

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What is considered a "slow connection", dial-up? With such a small workload, you can schedule your syncs several times a day if you need the changes sooner.

In sql 2000, schema changes can be handled only by sp_addreplcolumn and sp_dropreplcolumn. In sql 2005, this has been expanded to include the actual ALTER TABLE command as well as several other regular TSQL commands.

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Hi Greg,

The slow connection is a ISDN and the speed is 64Kbps upload and 128Kbps download. The changes will only be adding and modifications to records and it's all text data. Hope this connection can handle it.

Cheers,

VJ

|||if it's a reliable connection, it should handle it fine. If you expect line drops, then the merge agent retries will cause overall duration to increase.|||

One more quick thing. if the connection drops will the server drops the data or will it rollback and run the synchronization again. This is the first time I'm doing this

Cheers,

-VJ

|||merge agent will retry the data it failed, or retry from its last savepoint.|||I had implemented with more than 10,000 record sync daily on merge replication running on a very bad dsl connection that has frequent bad packet, but it work well, as long as the config. on the replication suit the environments.|||

Hi,

Sounds good. But what exactly did u implied by the config suits the environment,

Thanks,

-VJ

|||U have to config merge agent profile to suit your current environment.For example, the size of the batch to sync and others.sql