Greetings -- title pretty much says it all, but I'll elaborate.
Transactional, one-way replication from one Publisher to many Subscribers.
We've always had only one Publication per DB, with the Subscriptions to it initialized via backup and restore. However, for long winded reasons we want to split out some of our smaller tables into a second Publication, to be initialized via Snapshot.
The problem that we've recently encountered though is that when the Snapshot kicks off, a drop/ recreate for the tables in that Publication is attempted. This works, unless there is a foreign key to a table in the Publication that was initialized from back/ restore exists, in which case the whole thing fails.
I know about the "Copy foreign key constraints" option under the Publication properties tab, but don't think that will be applicable since the first Publication/ Subscription to each Subscriber will be initialized via backup/ restore, and of course the FK's will be copied to the Subscriber.
That said, will anything bad happen from simply dropping the FK's on the Subscriber after the first Subscription has been created?
Thanks!
TIA, ChrisRDBA