Monday, January 21, 2008

Distribution failure due to Data type differences

Recently I have faced with an issue were the published article column type is different from the subscriber column type. One of the publication articles column data type was varchar and the subscriber table (destination object ) data type was integer. The data in source object support to have a value similar to 012345 where the first character was the number zero and it didn't created any failures until somebody actually put in a value of C12345. This has lead to fail the replication. The only way to get around this was to delete the actual transaction from distribution database.
I used the following steps to do this:

use distributiondb
1. Get an article Id from MSarticles table
2. run exec sp_browsereplcmds @article_id = 'article Id'
3. get the xact_seqno of the article that caused this issue
4. delete the transaction from MSrepl_transactions.
- delete from MSrepl_transactions where xact_seqno =
5. delete the replication commands from MSrepl_commands
- delete MSrepl_commands where xact_seqno =
6. rerun the distribution agent
7. fix the route cause
Note that there is only one entry in MSrepl_transactions while you may have more than one entries in MSrepl_commands.




Monday, January 14, 2008

SQL Server 2000 virtual server install fails

Recently, I have tried to install SQL Server 2000 virtual server on windows server 2003 and the installation fails. I have installed numerous installations on windows 2000 server and never seen such an error. Tried to Google, went to various news groups and have been thinking of what it could be when I have discovered that this is a known issue that has been reported by Microsoft. For details of how to solve this issue go to
Microsoft help and support page