Replication Distribution Agent

  • Hey,

    This is on SQL 2K, but the relevant knowledge will be in this forum.

    I have a 3 server replication solution, with transactional replication data passing from Server A to B to C, and seperate publications passing C to B to A.

    Now when we initially set this up, we have Server B doing all the work, and in the Agent Job list you can see all of the Distibution Agents are running from here (Push and Pull). The thing is though the Distribution Database on Server A is getting bigger and bigger.

    Am I missing something here and this is still in use regardless of the distribution agent location? It seems that way so I want to improve my knowledge!!!

    Cheers

    (Also the dist db on Server B is easily maintained, cleans up to a neat size and backups up quickly, the db on Server A takes 2 hours to cleanup, and is constantly oversized)

  • Just an Update FYI -

    The distributer on Server A was set to keep transactions no more than 35000 (or therebouts) hours! Not sure why as ALL 3 servers were set to 72 previously. Very odd - This must have changed on its own but I can't think why. So the distribution db being so big could be explained by this.

    However it still doesn't explain to me why it is doing any work at all in that db, and why it is taking 3-6 hours to run the distribution clean up on that server.

    I have kicked off another cleanup and will see how it goes!

  • Is it the database or the transaction log that is growing?

    I've seen this a few times before on SQL 2000.

    The recovery model for the Distribution database is "Full", and although there was a maintenance plan to back up the transaction logs for both system and user databases, the distribution database is neither a system database nor a user database, and therefore the transaction log wasn't being backed up.

    The result was that the distribution transaction log was continually growing...

  • The database mainly. The log is bigger than I'd expect to (5 gig) but the database is steadily rising and is now at 15 gig. I will see how this cleanup goes now that I have changed the retention, but as above, I'm not sure why this Distribution Database is doing any work at all.

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