Transaction Replication on Azure MI servers

Question

I'm struggling to verify whether an Azure Managed Instance of SQL Server can both subscribe to Transactional Replication, and Publish, at the same time - I've been googling like a demon and stackexchanging and all the rest of it and am getting wildly conflicting answers!!

Please please please - is this possible? If so, I'll work out how, but as the MI hasn't been put up yet I can't just try it and see...I can't submit the proposal to our change review board until I know how many servers I need, which I don't know until I know if I can do this...I'm stuck in a loop!!

Finally (and I'm happy to put this as a new question if needed...) when setting up the second publication from our other MI, there's no option to change the username for the publication - is this a usual expected limitation? For on Prem I'm used to being able to supply a different username for different publications...my colleague is concerned that having the same user means (and I quote): "that would be trying to use the same log reader agent on two different Publications (with different tables in them)? I'm concerned about conflicts and performance" - personally I don't see how having the same user will cause an issue though???

Answer 1

can [Managed Instance Databases] both subscribe to Transactional Replication, and Publish, at the same time

Yes. Both publishing and subscribing are supported and you can do both, even in the same database, even on the same tables ( ie: Bi-Directional Transactional Replication).

Transactional and Snapshot replication are supported on Managed Instance. And Managed Instance databases can both publish and subscribe, and a Managed Instance can serve as either a local or remote distributor.

Here are the main supported scenarios:

• Publisher with local Distributor on a Managed Instance
• Publisher with remote distributor on a Managed Instance
• Publisher and distributor on-premises with a subscriber on a single, pooled, and instance database

Transactional replication with single, pooled, and instance databases in Azure SQL Database