You can remove the free space before you backup, etc. but that will only help your restore time as when you take a backup only the used space is backed...

One more thing.

If you re-initialize, I'm pretty sure that means that the publisher will generate an entirely new snapshot and apply it to the subscriber. (Not just the added articles)

Chris.

Hi Pat,

Most of my experience with this is in MS SQL 2000 but it should be almost the same.

Its not that simple. To add new articles to your publication...

Since you can't have any downtime and neither provider can communicate, then I think your options are quite limited.

Could you set up 3 way merge replication between the 2 providers...

Any... 🙂

I'm assuming you can't copy files directly between the servers, that you need to copy them locally first, right?

(Sorry for all the questions, its hard to troubleshoot more...

You can see them via your VPN/own machine but the Source and Destination servers cannot communicate directly, right?

Well that certainly complicates things.

Whats the transaction volume of your app?

Chris.

I think you'll get a much bigger boost by moving the tempdb onto its own drive than creating a few extra data files. I'd make that a higher priority.

Chris.

I actually had this problem today and changed it to *.* and it worked. Give that a shot.

Chris.

Guess that depends. Are you having any performance issues? Is tempdb on separate drives from your other dbs?

Chris.

How fast is your connection between sites? Can the sites see each other?

Lets assume it isn't very fast and the two sites cannot see each other at all.

Do...

There are a couple ways to do this. If its a SQL Server service, you could just write and schedule a query that runs from another server against the server...

What Jeff said but also...

I develop several handy utilities/scripts that I eventually propagate to all of my servers. Having them in a small utility container makes it very easy to...

As far as I can tell you can't search for objects from SSMS, but you could in Query Analyzer. (Press F4 when in QA to bring it up)

However you can...

Personally, while it is very tempting, I never add UDFs to a system database. I create a "DBA" database where I stick my utilities, custom procs, etc. It is still...