Replication Types

Microsoft® SQL Server™ provides three major types of replication, and two options, to use as you design your distributed applications:

• Snapshot
• Transactional
  • Immediate-updating Subscribers option
  • Replication of stored procedure execution option
• Merge

Each of these types provides different capabilities and different attributes for transactional consistency and can be arrayed along a continuum from eventual data convergence to immediate guaranteed consistency.

Snapshot replication takes a snapshot of current data in a publication at a Publisher and replaces the entire replica at a Subscriber on a periodic basis, in contrast to publishing changes when they occur.

Transactional replication marks selected transactions in the Publisher’s database transaction log for replication and then distributes them asynchronously to Subscribers as incremental changes, while maintaining transactional consistency.

Merge replication allows sites to make autonomous changes to replicated data, and at a later time, merge changes made at all sites. Merge replication does not guarantee transactional consistency.

See Also