Could SQL Server 2008 replication be used with NLB to allow unlimited scaling of reporting servers?

Posted by John Keranos on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by John Keranos
Published on 2010-06-21T16:03:13Z Indexed on 2012/09/03 9:40 UTC
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We are currently using transactional replication in SQL Server 2008 to keep a secondary reporting server synchronized with a primary database server. This has been working weel and keeps some of the load off the primary server. Would it be possible to scale this solution to multiple reporting servers? We're expecting an increased load of read-only queries and it would be nice to be able to add reporting servers as needed.

The general idea was the following:

  1. Each reporting server would use a "pull" subscription to get the data from the primary database publication. These reporting databases could be a couple of minutes behind the primary server without it being an issue.
  2. The reporting servers would be NLB'd together. All read-only queries would be directed to the NLB which should spread the load across the servers.

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