Recovering a replication publisher

[pmegan]

Hi,

I'm trying to resolve a problem that got thrown at me today. We have a SQL Server 2000 database that acts as a master list of customers. It's the publisher for an hourly merge replication, with 23 subscribing servers. The server crashed this weekend and is now flagged as suspect due to torn pages. The best, and possibly only, way to go on this is restoring from a backup. I did some digging and found that the last backup is pretty old, but this is because the SQL Server Agent wasn't started after the last reboot, so replication also hasn't run since the same date.

It seems to me that since the backup and replication stopped at about the same time, restoring that backup and restarting replication should result in one huge merge from each subsriber and then it should get back to business as usual. Does this sound right? I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of replication, so my biggest concern is with creating a new snapshot. Will this cause the subscribers to delete any data not in the snapshot, or is it more of a "here's what I have, what have you got" kind of communication?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[mrdenny]

That should do the trick. You'll need to make sure to check the keep replication checkbox in the UI (or using the corresponding flag) when restoring the database so that the replication will fire back it.

It "should" talk with the subscribers and start replicating again right away. Just to be on the safe side backup your subscribers just in case. If you restore the publisher with the checkbox checked you should be able to fire up the replication without having to push the snapshot.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

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