In transactional replication, is it possible to use the option @identityrangemanagementoption = auto without having updateable subscriptions. We believe we have a legitimate business reason for doing this, and see no technical reason why we shouldn't be able to, but attempting to do so from a script gives us an error telling us we need to allow updateable subscriptions.
The reason we want to run this combination is that we are replicating from a live database (the publisher) to a BCP database (the subscriber). It's possible that, outside of replication, changes may be made to the BCP database (for example during routine tests we might log in to the BCP server to check that it is working, which will automatically trigger new log records being added in the BCP database). There is absolutely no need for such changes to be replicated back to production - the intended replication is one-way only to BCP, so there's no need for the overhead of having this 'reverse' replication enabled (and we also don't want the extra columns added to the replicated database tables that happens as soon as we switch on updateable subscriptions. Hence we do not want updateable subscriptions.
On the other hand, clearly we need to make sure that if extra records are added to the BCP database from outside replication, the identity columns don't clash with anything propagated through replication. Hence we believe we need the automatic identity management.
Is there any way to achieve this?
Thanks