Hi,
I have two servers, one in the office and another on a dedicated server that drives our website. The office runs SQL Server 2005 and the dedicated server is 2005 Express.
Until now I've automated backing up our office database, FTP'ing it to the dedicated server and restoring it.
This has worked fine but it's now taking around 45 minutes to FTP the database over our 1Mb SDSL line, hence the reason I'm experimenting with replication.
I have setup a publication and subscription on our office server. I want to push the updates to the subscriber, and is set to on-demand. The reason for the on-demand is that the synchronisation is the last step of a multi-step process so I need it under my control when that starts.
I can manually right-click on the subscription and select "View Synchronisation Status" and "Start" the job going there, but I want to be able to start the synchronisation from within our Intranet.
So my question is: How do I do start the synchronisation programatically from within a stored procedure?
In researching this I did come across this MSDN acrticle which involves calling a batch file and supplying all the information that's already been defined when the publication and subscription were setup using the Management Studio wizards. SQL Server already knows all those details, so in theory it should be a case of simply saying "Update all subscribers of this publication", where you supply the name of the publication.
Is this the only way to get this to run programatically? From a batch file?
I'm sure there are experts in this area out there who can help me out as there does not seem to be much information available for performing replication manually as opposed to scheduled or continuous.
Thanks in advance for your replies and advice.
Ray McKaig