Hello everyone
We have setup merge replication: Distributor/Publisher are on the same Server with Sql Server 2012 RTM (11.0.2100). Subscribers are on notebook with Sql Server 2012 Express SP2 (11.0.5058).
Time to time, user reports that synchronisation fails with the following error:
The merge process failed because it detected a mismatch between the replication metadata of the two replicas, such that some changes could be lost leading to non-convergence. This could be due to the subscriber not having synchronized within the retention period, or because of one of the replicas being restored to a backup older than retention period, or because of the publisher performing more aggressive cleanup on articles of type download-only and articles with partition_options = 3. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, Error number: MSSQL_REPL-2147199363) Get help: http://help/MSSQL_REPL-2147199363
Le filigrane de création commune n'est pas valide dans ce réplica, parce qu'il n'existe pas ou que les métadonnées relatives aux modifications qui n'ont pas encore été propagées ont peut-être été nettoyées. (Source: MSSQLServer, Error number: 21800) Get help: http://help/21800
Untill recently we always thought the reason of the failure was the first one. (User didn't synchronize during the retention period). So everytime invalid subscription were reset on both side (notebook and server) with upload_first = 'false'. Sometimes It was not enougth and the only solution was to drop the subscription and recreate it on the notebook.
But now we facing the same problem with a new notebook installed for a less than a month (although subscription expiration périod is set for 90 days).
We checked Database on server: Upload_options is set to 0 on sysmergearticles for every article and partition_options is set 0 on sysmergepartitioninfo. Database server were never restored and notebook was installed recently (less than a month)
So none of the three reasons provided by the error message seems to suits.
Does anyone have a clue on why this happen ?
Thank you very much