Example of troubleshooting Distribution Agent errors

I thought it would be helpful to post a Replication Distribution Agent troubleshooting case to show more about replication components and troubleshooting approaches. Problem: SQL Server Distribution Agent reported “Failed” in Replication Monitor. To capture text of the message we added the following parameters to the Distribution Agent job and restarted the job.  The –output
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KB article 312292 How to enable replication agents for logging to output files in SQL Server

While troubleshooting SQL Server Replication we often want to capture detail step-by-step execution of Replication Agent.  One technique is to configure the Agent to log its execution to a Text file.  This posting walks through a couple of different ways to accomplish this.  It is also covered in the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/?id=312292.  I’ll use both
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Deep Dive on Initialize from Backup for Transactional Replication

Sateesh Yele | Microsoft SQL Server Support How to initialize the subscriber from backup Create the publication using user interface Replication Wizard. Under subscription options for the publication, set “allow initialization from backup files” to true Create a new full backup of the publisher database. If you have existing full backup of the publisher database,
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Subscriber bloating when VarDecimal Compressed settings not transferred

When using compressed “VarDecimal Storage Format Enabled” on Transactional or Merge published tables you’ll discover this setting is not applied to subscribers leading to table bloating. Database Properties Table Properties Try This: Publish table with varDecimal USE [AdventureWorks2017] GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[DecZero]( [ID] [bigint] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT FOR REPLICATION NOT NULL, [F1] [decimal](23, 2) NOT NULL,
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