So I decided recreating a transactional replication (TR) from scratch instead of dropping and adding articles when we do our upgrade in the near future. Our DB is large, 280GB with 6000+ tables.
On a test environment, I created TR initialization from snapshot on a 15GB DB with 6000+ tables. It took approximately a painful 3 hours.
I asked around and I was pointed to the option to initialize subscription from backup.
Did some research and found this tutorial which was very helpful.
Replication: Initialize with Backup
So following it step by step and after several tries/tweaks, I was able to bring up my TR test in approximately 20 mins. I sampled some tables (add/delete) and it was replicating as desired.
I was wondering, why didn't he create a SNAPSHOT AGENT [REPL-Snapshot] (Remarked Out) at all even if he was using initialization from backup. Wouldn't there be any use of a snapshot agent once you have replication set up and running?
Is there anything I should be aware of using this option as well?
TIA