How to propagate changes to another database?

Question

I want to let any data changes, made to several tables, in one database be coppied (mirrored?) to similar tables of the other database. Both databases (when talking about tables I want to be syncronized) have similar tables' structure (schema). These tables contain rarely changed data, but if data does change, I'd like the changes to be propgated at the same time.

These tables contain some kind of reference data. The original database is the main one. The other one is used for some operational (online??) tasks, but it needs a couple of reference tables from the original database. So, is it admissible to do this copying (if "yes", than how)? Or the approach is wrong initially?

It seems that mirroring database is a more complicated operation than I need. And simple triggers seem to be more appropriate to do that. But I'm a little bit confused on how to do that exactly and whether this is the way I should do that.

The original database is on the ms sql server 2005. The target database is on the ms sql server 2000.

Answer 1

You cannot do this with triggers (at least not with only triggers). You need to account for unavailability and have capability to queue updates. The right technology is replication, either Transactional Replication or Merge Replication.