>>Don't know if you can do that with MSDE or not, but you can with SQL Server. Even then,
>>it didn't work very well, and if you get out of sync, it's a royal mess to try to get
>>synched back up. We gave up on letting SQL do it, it was just too fragile.
>
>Got any outside references to baack that up, or is this just personal experience talking? I've done some small-scale work with replication, but if I'm setting myself up for a fall later on, better to find out now. :-)

We tried it strictly in-house, and not much success. The big problem seems to be when you lose connectivity between the servers, it all gets royally hosed. We needed it for servers over a WAN, and couldn't even get it to work reliably with servers in the same rack! Simply pulling the network cables caused things to get messed up so that only a full blown restore of the databases would get it to work again. Another limitation was the initial snapshots required to get started. For our databases, it would have taken nearly 3 days to make the snapshot! Not a workable solution, especially when a snapshot was required to get things to sync back up again, too. In talking with other SQL administrators at other companies, their basic response was "Forget replication exists. It doesn't work." Seems pretty close to the truth in our experience.

Were currently investigating clustering, but that seems to have it's own sets of limitations, especially in a WAN environment :(