Wish List: SQL Server Replication

I’ve worked on a few system that use replication and the same issues tend to crop up. There’s a discussion on SQL Server Central about what needs to be improved, so I thought I’d share my experiences

• Better default indexes (See blog)
• Vote | Improve replication latency monitoring (built-in canary tables).
• Vote | QueryStore for distribution databases
• Fix the silent fail issue where replication can timeout and fail to create tables or insert \ delete SPs.
• Vote | Increase the 2GB compression limit for snapshots
  • Maybe compress each article rather than the whole snapshot.
• Reduce \ eliminate locking when creating snapshot.
• Why is the compatibility level of the distribution database 2005?
• Ability to create pull subscription jobs on Web edition (here’s my scripts)
• Ability to synchronise the indexes between the publisher and the subscriber. So new indexes and changes are automatically replicated out.
• Improved logging and diagnostics for errors.
  • Better ability to see command information.
• Ability to analyse the transactions per object (possible with scripts) to help identify tables that are being updated too often and causing unnecessary strain.
• Vote | Ability to optimise the order of the snapshot (inspect the dependency and reorder using sp_changearticle and sp_changemergearticle).
  • Through Aireforge we’ve written but not released something that does this. If people are interested, let us know and create a SSMS plug-in.