Transactional Database Replication over an unreliable channel

Question

I wanted to set up database replication (transactional) between 2 offices and I was wondering if it's advised to do so over an unreliable channel? I plan to set up this transactional replication on a VPN over the internet, and I'm trying to account for disruptions to the internet connection. Are there any other transactional replication issues I should take into account?

Also, I haven't been able to figure out the difference between transactional replication with updatable subscriptions and merged replication, is there any recommended article/book for replication best practices.

I'm hoping to set up this repliction on SQL Server 2008. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

We have had a lot of success using Merge Replication with a scneario where the clients are offline quite a bit and we can have two way changes. The interface and setup for Merge Replication was fairly painless. The only real challenges we had was with the logging / validation levels. IF these are set to high it can cause some real pain staking performance issues. The Microsoft documentation on Merge replication is really good and the Replication Forums on Social MSDN are also very good (You will get some good responses to questions from folks like Hilary Cotter (MVP)).

Using VPN could be a good candiate for Merge Replication although really depends on amount of data, etc. I have about 20 subscriptions that are offline a lot and have very little issues using Merge Replication, but they are not performing large amounts of transactions.