Transactional Replication Stalls when mirror offline

  • We have one server running sql server 2005 enterprise edition. It is using transactional replication to push data to multiple subscribers. We also have synchronous database mirroring between the publisher and a secondary fail over server. For some reason when the fail over server is taken down (say for maintenance) the transactional replication on the primary server stops. It picks back up when the mirror is brought online but while the secondary server is down it does not replicate any data. No errors in the log files.

    Anyone have this problem?

  • its not a problem, its by design.

    with synchronous mirroring the transaction has to be committed on the partner before it can be committed on the primary. so whilst the partner is offline the transactions are being held in the primaries log file, which will slowly (or perhaps quickly) fill. Thus no transactions are committed and thus cannot be replicated.

    For this reason minimise the time the partner is offline, or bring it down at quite times.

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  • just noticed you have enterprise edition. You can use asynchronous mirroring with that. Unless you need automatic failover you should consider changing to asynchronous mode (high performance or safety off).

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  • Makes sense. Thanks for the reply. I thought we had the same issue when it was set to asynchronous mirroring but I will check it out again.

    Thanks again.

  • this might help

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151799.aspx

    looks like asynchronous mirroring will also hold up replication when mirror is down, because it needs to hold onto the transactions to apply them to the mirror when it comes back up, even though it has committed them, thus replicated transactions cannot be cleared.

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