I am a new developer and have written an application which solves some very important problems for my company. At the moment, I am stuck on replication. I believe what I need is merge replication but before I waste any more valuable time I wanted to ask for advice. The specific problem I am trying to solve is this. The company has around thirty marine vessels which frequently lose internet connection. The application I have written writes to a sqlserver 2012 database installed locally on each marine vessel. When the vessels have connection, it also writes to a sqlserver 2012 database which currently resides on an azure vm. What I need to happen is this. I need the databases on the marine vessels to replicate with the remote database. I believe that I need the local databases on the marine vessels to be the publisher and distributor and that I want the changes to be pushed to the remote server residing on the azure vm. The setup has been so hard to implement (probably because I'm still dealing with the learning curve) that I am wondering if this is the best way to go. Any advice on whether this is the correct way to go or if there are better alternatives is greatly appreciated.
I have also tried using the sync framework, and the sql azure sync agent. I have gotten both to achieve exactly what I am after, except for one thing. The application residing on the marine vessels will create new tables. I have not found anyway to add the new tables to the sync schema, without manually going in and setting them up. Since I will not be on these vessels, it's not really an option. If there is a way to add the new tables programmatically then the sync agent would work perfectly for me.
Thanks to all for any help.