Chapter 12. Inside Replication Tools

One of the biggest challenges in designing tools for database replication is to make administration and monitoring simple when the technology is complex. As with any distributed database technology, you have to think not only about database interactions, but also about connectivity, cross-server security, network performance and reliability, conflicting data changes, and many other factors that can affect the success of your deployment. Our quest has always been to make understanding and configuring replication easy so you can focus on your database and application design and let us handle the rest.

During the development of SQL Server 2005, we had countless discussions about how we could simplify the tools by asking better questions, having better defaults, automatically handling more unexpected circumstances, and crafting the paradigms and terminology to make the technology easy to understand. The tools in SQL Server 2005 represent tens of thousands of hours of effort to simplify the management of database replication.

In this chapter, we discuss the major components for administering and monitoring database replication in SQL Server 2005. After examining how replication objects and tasks are represented in Management Studio, we look at the New Publication Wizard and the New Subscription Wizard. Finally, you can see inside the new Replication Monitor.