Einar,

Sorry for the delay, I've been out of the office all of last last week.

Replication is not terribly hard. It just sounds that way.

You first set up your publisher at the central site. When you open Enterprise Manager and open your server, you should see a section for Replication. Open this and you will see sections for Publications and Subscriptions. Right click on Publications and select New Publications. The wizard will take you through the steps of creating a new publication, selecting your database, the type of publication (Snapshot updates the entire database, Transactional performs an initial snapshot with incremental updates based on transactions. Merge replication copies changes on a schedule that you define).

Let's say you do a snapshot replication. Next you will select the type of subscribers you expect, (I believe MSDE supports Server 2000 if you have the most recent version.) If you need to go to a Pocket PC SQL CE for example, you will need heterogeneous data sources.

Next select the tables, stored procedures, views, and user defined functions that you want to include in the publication. If you don't include a table in a publication, the subscriber will never know it is there. So if a table is needed for referential integrity, you must include it.

Then you name the publication (your choice)

Once the publication is created, you can right click on it and create a push subscription to any server that you can see. You can also set how often the distribution agent updates the subscription. You can do this periodically during the day or essentially continuously depending on your needs.

Your initial subscription should probably copy the schema and data.

Once you feel comfortable with snapshot replication, move on to transactional or merge replication. They are not much more difficult.

Mike A.


>Mike,
>
>Thank you for your replies. I have more.. When it comes to replication, is it a generally easy and stable or a lot of problems and work? In my case I like to have a central DB here and let each office (5-15 users) at up to 5 sites subscribe with a filter and publish new data to the main DB. I like to use MSDE at the offices and SQL std at the central site.
>
>Einar
>
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>>This is a question for my network person, but he is not here today. So I'll take a stab at it. I was under the impression that all of our replication is performed by the SQL Server Agent using SQL Server Authentication having the SYSADMIN role for a SQL user account that exists on all domains. This user name is NOT given out to users but is only used for replication and administration tasks. Furthermore, I do not believe the Merge Agent (which runs under SQL Server Agent) can use Windows Authentication Mode.
>>