Question

I’m trying to determine if there’s a better way to handle replication than the way we’re currently doing things.

We’re essentially trying to determine 2 things:

1. Is there any way to add an existing column from a table to replication
   without reinitializing the whole
   publication
2. Can you just select a specific article to reinitialize instead of all
   of the articles in a publication?

(I’m a bit new to replication… trying to get up to speed, so I apologize if my terminology doesn’t make sense)

Right now we have about 30 publications so that if any have to be reinitialized there’s a minimal impact… because several of our tables are pretty massive. We’d prefer to only have several publication.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Update

When we try to add a column to an article we receive the message:

You have changed one or more
properties that require all
subscriptions to be reinitialized.
Saving these changes marks each
subscription that supports automatic
reinitialization to be reinitialized
from a snapshot the next time its
Distribution Agent runs. You must run
the Snapshot Agent to generate the
snapshot.

We want to avoid reinitializing all subscriptions.. we’re using transactional replication… again we want to add an existing column to an existing publication without having to reinitialize all subscriptions.

Answer 1

What kind of replication? Snapshot, Merge, Transacitonal, Peer-to-Peer?

1) Yes. See Making Schema Changes on Publication Databases:

• To add a new column to a table and
  include that column in an existing
  publication, execute ALTER TABLE
  ADD . By default, the
  column is then replicated to all
  Subscribers. The column must allow
  NULL values or include a default
  constraint.
• To include an existing column in an
  existing publication, use
  sp_articlecolumn (Transact-SQL),
  sp_mergearticlecolumn (Transact-SQL),
  or the Publication Properties –
  dialog box.

2) It depends on the replication type. See Reinitializing a Subscription:

Reinitializing a subscription involves
applying a new snapshot of one or more
articles to one or more Subscribers:
transactional and snapshot replication
allow individual articles to be
reinitialized; merge replication
requires all articles to be
reinitialized.