http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2647118

When setting up merge replication on your SQL 2008 + server, please be careful with the parameter STREAM_BLOB_COLUMN. By default, this option is set to FALSE, as explained here in BOL: [ @stream_blob_columns= ] 'stream_blob_columns' Specifies that a data stream optimization be used when replicating...

Problem : While running the snapshot agent, the available memory of the server goes down to 0 and snapshot may even fail. Should the snapshot complete, the memory is released very slowly. Cause : This is because in the current design (SQL 2005 and higher), snapshot agent uses SNAC BCP provider...

Problem : Publisher: SQL Server 2008 Subscriber: SQL Server Compact 3.5 Merge Replication Performance issue when using keep_partition_changes or precomputed partitions Cause : There could be many causes to this and analysis would have to be done however sometimes it may be...

Seems like there was an issue with the comments for this blog - I wasn’t getting notified and hence never got to respond. My apologies to all those that commented and never got a reply. If you do have a comment, please do not hesitate to e-mail me by selecting "e-mail Blog Author" Thanks...

Problem : Consider the following scenario: You add a new article(s) to an existing publication in your merge replication environment and Your merge agent uses '-ParallelUploadDownload' parameter with a value of 1 for synchronization. Note: Merge Agent profile High Volume Server-to-Server...

A lot of users have wondered about the performance latency transactional replication suffers over WAN. After analyzing / discussing this within the teams, here are the main points one should take into consideration when deciding / testing this type of implementation: Should you notice performance...

I noticed that many people overlook optimizing their filters in a merge replication topology. This is crucial to performance and attempting to tweak the replication itself (example: using pre-computed partitions) may not be sufficient. An example of such: All the join filters specified against...

A little explanation before explaining how to resolve this issue: The retention period for subscriptions specified for each publication controls how often the Publisher and Subscribers should synchronize. If subscriptions do not synchronize with the Publisher within the retention period, they are...

PART V: "How To" get down to whatever is bringing SQL to its knees... At this point, following the previous Performance Analysis posts, we have arrived to the following conclusions: 1. We know what server / SQL Server build we are dealing with 2. We have checked for all errors SQL Server could...

one possible cause... There are many factors that can influence the performance on a transactional replication topology. I would like to address one that is not so commonly known. Problem : I had worked on an issue in which we were experiencing performance latency. Once the latency was pinpointed...

PART IV: "How To" get down to whatever is bringing SQL to its knees... At this point, one should know already whether or not they have memory pressure / cpu bottleneck / disk issues (previous blog posts). With that information, we now filter down and look for the cause. What is truly causing...

PART III: "How To" get down to whatever is bringing SQL to its knees... Now let’s get down to pinpointing the troublemaker: In most cases, when SQL’s performance is degraded, we never know what exactly is causing the issue. In most cases, we also don’t know how to express SQL Server's performance...

PART II: "How To" get down to whatever is bringing SQL to its knees... SQL Server Error Log : If SQL Server has an issue, this is most likely where you will find an indication to what is going wrong. This log provides us with lots of information: 1. The first line tells us what...

PART I: "How To" get down to whatever is bringing SQL to its knees... Having worked with SQL Server for a few years now, I know that one of the most problematic issues is performance . There are many ways however of analyzing SQL Server performance and pinpointing the bottleneck that is causing...