We are planning to upgrade SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012 and both the databases will be hosted on two different servers. SQL Server 2005 has around 25 merge publication and have around 400 laptops that subscribe to these publications. The new SQL server 2012 will also have same replication setup as the old server. The data base size on the existing server is 66 GB and takes about 1.5 hrs for initial sync up.
Due to various business constraints we can't move over to new server in a single switch. Instead we need to keep both the servers running for a month or two. During this process, we need to replicate (uni-directional) data from SQL server 2005 to SQL server 2012 on a daily basis. To achieve this we have tried the following approaches so far:
- DB backup and restore from SQL 2005 to SQL 2012 server - In this approach, the publications are dropped by SQL 2012 after we restore.
- SQL native replication - Could not setup Transactional, Merge and Snapshot replication due SQL server constraints. Cannot setup merge replication between SQL 2005(publisher) and SQL 2012(subscriber)
- Microsoft Sync framework – Sync fwk expects identify column or primary key for the sync to work but database has 76 tables without any primary key
- SSIS – DB consists of 170 tables and will require significant effort to write and maintain the package to sync update and delete operations on the DB. Insert operations on the other hand are easy to support.
We are looking for different options to setup server to server replication with given constraints.