Retention period reduction during merge replication

[jcaulder]

SQL Server 2000 Publisher with MSDE subscribers using Merge Replication.

Our retention period is currently set to the default of 14 days. We would like to reduce this to 10 days or perhaps to 7 days to decrease the metadata being stored in the merge tables.

Can this be done while replicating by simply changing the value or will it require reinitialization for all subscribers? I read that increasing the retention period would lead to non-convergence but I saw no such warnings related to reducing it. It would seem logical that the excess metadata would simply be removed upon next merge agent process for data greater than the new setting(10 days) but I was hoping someone could confirm it's as simple as this.

 

[jcaulder]

After all my reading, research and testing, it appears that adjusting the retention period causes no problems while replicating.

I am still concerned about the statement from Microsoft that says "increasing the retention period after a clean up will lead to non-convergence".

I still cannot understand that unless it means manually running a clean up job on data that has not yet replicated. Clearly that would lead to non-convergence but that would apply regardless of whether the retention period was being changed or not? Since normally the clean up process runs after the merge process has completed, I can't see how increasing the retention period would cause any issue(because sub and pub are in sync by then). Increasing the retention period would just mean the remaining metadata will be kept longer but I don't see how non-convergence would occur.

If I stumble upon any other information to the contrary, I will post it back here. While I do not intend to increase the retention period(I am actually decreasing it), I wanted to ensure I could easily go down and back up if we saw it was necessary at some point.