Greetings!

We are replicating a table (many of them actually, but one in particular)
which is about 10 GB...660K rows including some text columns. We needed to
change the properties of one column and did not want to pay the penalty of
reinitializing the subscription, so I added a temp column "A_temp", populated
that with the data from the original column "A" then dropped column "A" and
readded it with new properties including NOT NULL. We are then loading "A"
from "A_temp" and then dropping the "A_temp" column. In theory this is fine
and it is working...however the updates are remarkably slow...three records a
second with the sp_MSUpd_... stored procedure. At that rate, the whole
shebang will take days instead of hour or so it would have with the reinit
and snapshot. This is generally the way MS would recommend doing the schema
change from what I have studied. The publisher and distributor are same
server and the subscriber is a remote, but on the LAN, machine.

You could check the query plan of the update stored proc - perhaps it would
benefit from different indexes at the subscriber or perhaps the indexes are
fragmented - also worth checking. Finally, check to see if there is any
blocking going on that accounts for the slowdown.
HTH,
Paul Ibison

Thank you for your reply. I did notice that the replication update was
blocking other things, but we have rectified that - for now. The actual
update doesn't appear to be blocked at all. We do have the column with a
clustered index on it. Actually thought of dropping indexes to see if it
sped up, but the column which is getting updated is not indexes, so I wasn't
expected a lot out of that. I haven't checked out the query plan...I think
you are right that it is worth a look. I'll see if I can get one of my
admins to toss me an actual sp call instead of having me guess at the
parameters....

Thanks again!

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