The July issue of the magazine has just gone to press and it available as a PDF download for those subscribers in their Virtual Briefcase. It deals with replication and we've included the editorial below for those that want to see what's inside. The magazine should be available shortly on the PASS site as well as the MCP Special Offers page.

If you aren't a subscriber, PASS member, or MCP, you can purchase the PDF of this single issue for $3.99 in our store.

We hope you enjoy it and please feel free to send us some feedback on what you think (webmaster@sqlservercentral.com).

Replication

It's an interesting technology, the automatic movement of data from one system to another. When I first heard about replication I thought, “why”? Just query the other system and you don't have to worry about keeping things in synch, latencies, etc. That was many years ago and I was more concerned about the development side than I was anything else. As my career has advanced, especially with the growth of the Internet, it's really a great technology that can provide data protection, scalability, load balancing, off line environments, and more. I've used it to move heavily accessed read only data to other servers to handle large loads, to simulate a message queue system and migrate data between systems, and we are looking at it as a rollback strategy for SQLServerCentral.com. We're hoping to upgrade to SQL Server 2005, but to maintain a fall back strategy. The various parts of the site that change quite often would be replicated back to a SQL Server 2000 server in case we decided to undo the upgrade.

I'm sure that many of you have other creative and more interesting ways of using replication, so we've devoted an entire issue this month to that topic. We've got an inside look at the changes for SQL Server 2005 from Vaqar Pirzada of Microsoft. There have been quite a few improvements, so be sure to check that one out. Tony Mann of Mann Publishing, also looks at replication in SQL Server 2005 Express, and sure to check out the Mann Publishing offerings as they've been working on quite a few SQL Server 2005 publications.

We've also got not one, but two articles this month from SQL Server MVPs. Merge replication expert and Solid Quality Learning mentor Michael Hotek brings us a look at the internals of merge replication. We have Paul Ibison bringing us a practical method of up replication without stressing your network with an unnecessary snapshot initialization.

In March we looked at Hancock Information Group, publishing a series of articles as a detailed case study on how this company uses SQL Server. One of the things that we left out was their extensive use of replication. They replicate over 200 databases and Andy Warren brings us another practical article looking at how you can move a replicated database. It's not allowed in SQL Server 2000, but Andy gives us an easy way to make it happen.

Lastly, Jeremy Kadlec from Edgewood Solutions looks at the concept of continuous data protection (CDP). How can you ensure that your data is always safe and available? Replication is one of the ways, but Jeremy brings us a few things that you should consider, both technology and administratively related. This is an exciting new technology that has gotten a lot of press as of late.

This has been an interesting half year with the magazine and I really hope that you have enjoyed our focusing each issue on a single topic. The remainder of the year promises to be even more exciting as we get closer to the release of SQL Server 2005.

Steve Jones