Offline backup synchronization
- by Pavan Kumar
There is a Central Server running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 and there are 7 client machines situated in various places and has XP Pro & SQL Server 2005 installed in all of them. They are not interconnected so they are physically seperate. One person goes to each of these centers maybe twice a month and takes the backup (Full database consisting of mdf and ldf files) with a pen drive and brings it to the Central server which contains the central database holding same schema as all the other client databases. I need to synchronize each backup database (belonging to different centers) one by one to update the existing data or inserting new data in the central database .
The solution i got was Replication. The pendrive is brought to central server consisting of 7 instances of the databases and then the databases is attached to the central server one by one to the same SQL Server where the central database exists. Then my idea was to replicate the backup database one by one i.e using single subscription (Central Database) and multiple publication ( i.e 7 instances of databases in my case) toplogy by performing replication locally (i.e in the same machine). So i tried to develop a UI in C# .Net to programatically run the Transactional Replication with push subscription using RMO Programming (which is incomplete as of now because there is no point in developing when you already know it is not the solution). Transactional Replication can either be set to initialize with a snapshot or without a snapshot. If i go for the first option i.e with a snapshot , the data whatever is present in Central Database is overwritten by the new data . So the data present initially in the central database is lost. If i try to initialize without snapshot , no data (the data already has the updated and new data) will be sent from the backup database to server. The replication will work in a scenario where any incremental changes is done only after you set the replication . So the initial data whatever was present in the backup database when setting up the replication will not be replicated when running the snapshot agent for the first time to synchronize. Only changes in the backup database thereafter will be reflected to the central database .(Remember I am not going to insert new data or make any changes to the backup database after i attach it to the Central Server. ) So this solution is not feasible.
I want a solution for synchronizing from one client database to central database present in the same machine using C#.NET. If you can provide me small example maybe with two databases(with same schema) DB1(Client) to DB2(Server) consisting of one or two tables it will be very helpful. The synchronization is not bidirectional.I want to only update existing data or insert new data from DB1 to DB2 (DB2 may contain some data initially).
Thanks and Regards
Pavan
