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Part V: Enterprise Data Management
importance. There is a warning on this screen simply stating that the default loca-
tion could not be accessed by pull subscriptions because it is not a network path.- After you select the location for your snapshot folder or snapshot share, click Next.
The Distribution Database dialog enables you to name your distribution database
and select folders where the database data and log fi les will reside.
Best Practice
If you have a large number of subscribers, or you replicate over a WAN, you should use a share for your
snapshot folder, or use FTP along with pull subscribers. (You can confi gure FTP server details when you
create your publication.) With pull subscribers, the merge or distribution agent or process runs on the
subscriber. With push subscribers, the distribution and merge agents run on the publisher/distributor
or distributor. If you use push subscribers with a remote distributor, your snapshot folder must also
be confi gured as a snapshot share. It is not a good security practice to use the Admin shares (that is,
C$), but rather a share name that hides the path of the actual physical snapshot folder location and
does not require the distribution or merge agents to run under an account that has rights to access
the snapshot share.Best Practice
Optimal confi guration of a distributor or a distribution server is on a 64-bit server with ample RAM and
RAID 10 drives. The distributor server will be I/O and network bound, so the more RAM available for
caching and the greater the available network bandwidth, the greater the throughput of your trans-
actional replication solution. Merge replication is CPU- and network-bound, so these best practices
do not apply for it.- Click Next to allow the publishers that you want to use this distributor. If this is a
local publisher/distributor, your publisher is already selected. If not, you need to
click the Add button if you want to allow other publishers to use this distributor. - Click Next to assign a distributor password. This allows remote publishers to use
this distributor as their distributor. - Click Next, Next again, and Finish to complete the creation of your distributor. You
also have the option to generate a script that allows you to manually create the
distributor database using T-SQL. If you are adventurous, script it out, and run it
on another server.
Using a Remote Distributor
To confi gure a publisher to use a remote distributor, follow these steps:- Connect to the publisher using SQL Server Management Studio, right-click the
Replication folder, and select Confi gure Distribution.
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