One great feature of SQL Server is the ability to get alerts when there are issues. The alert process can send email notifications using Database Mail after you have configured your SMTP settings and setup your jobs and alerts to use this account. In some cases you may not have a mail server, but still want to setup alerts. In this tip we will walk through how you can setup Database Mail to use email services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc…
There are situations where you might have a large SQL Server database that you need to replicate. Since the database is very large we want to initialize the Subscriber from the SQL Server backup and not use a snapshot. How do we bundle all the steps together to achieve this without performing them manually?
You’ve set up replication initially by using the GUI and accepting all defaults and now due to growth you need to change your default replication snapshot folder location to another drive since the current location is a local disk and cannot be expanded to accommodate the growth.
This concerns you as you cannot afford downtime to perform a re-initialization of all your existing subscribers as they are needed to run the business.
Solution
You can change the snapshot location without having to perform a re-initialization. The only caveat to this is you do need to generate a new snapshot. This snapshot will not be applied to your subscribers, but has to go through the generation process. I recommend doing this at night or weekends to minimize the impact of the snapshot agent locking tables and contention on the publisher database. Continue reading How to change default snapshot folder for Replication?→
SQL Server 2005 has a lot of features and sometimes these additions are overlooked as a new way of configuring and managing your SQL Server environment.
One of these features is Peer to Peer transactional replication. In the past, people have used transactional replication for load balancing, to keep a read only version for reporting purposes or possibly for a failover solution. Continue reading Peer to peer replication in SQL Server 2005→
You have a transactional replication configured in your production environment with multiple subscribers. The business team has requested that one of the subscriptions be reinitialized, because they think there is some missing data. In this tip we look at the different options that you can use to reinitialize a subscription for transactional replication.
Solution
If we come across this requirement there are different ways by which we could achieve this. In this tip, we will accomplish this by using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Replication Monitor. Note, both options assume transactional replication is already configured in your server. Continue reading Reinitialize subscriptions in SQL Server replication→
