I'm in a case where I want to have a second copy of a database for reporting purposes, however the tables in the source database have no keys in them, and I can't change the structure of those tables by adding keys, hence transnational replication is not an option... thus the following are what I have in mind:
- Log shipping: but this has constraints on the source and destination SQL Server instances versions to make the secondary database read only + the secondary database will be read only so I can't create indexes + security is a headache if I want to have some users to have read access to the secondary but not the primary.
- Snapshot replication: the database is relatively big, and I see it a heavy process to create a snapshot for the whole database every night then overwrite the replica ... and I'm wondering if this will also overwrite the created indexes on the replica or not!
Is there any other solution?