Including Views in Replication

I have a three server peer-to-peer replication setup that includes articles for tables and views. As I understand the BOL, scheme changes -- which I take to mean changes, amont other things, changes in the design of a table or view -- should automatically replicate to the other servers in the topology. Here are my quesitons:

When including a view as part of the publication, what is it, exactly, that is getting replicated? If all the tables supporting a given view are being replicated, and the view exists on all three boxes, whatelse, besides the view schema (and changes thereto) is being replicated?

Secondly, if in fact schema changes are replicated, why can't I modify a view that is part of a publication? When I try to make a change to such a view, I get a server timeout message, every single time. When I remove the view from the publication, I can make the modification with no trouble. What does replicating schema changes mean if I can't make changes to the schema?

Thanks for any enlightenment on this.

Randy

In general, when views are replicated, the schema definition of the view object is actually what gets replicated. After initial sync, there are no data changes tied to a view.

In non-peer-to-peer transactional replication, view schema changes are propagated from the publisher to the subscribers automatically. i.e. A view schema change could be changing the list of columns included in the view select statement.

Since you have a peer-to-peer topology set up there are more restrictions to consider. Check out the General Considerations under Peer-to-Peer replication in SQL Server 2005 Books Online. One of the restrictions is that any schema changes require the peer-to-peer topology to be quiesced (stopping activity on published tables at all nodes and ensuring that each node has received all changes from all other nodes).

Hope this helps,

Tom

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the resultset and content of the view can only be replicated if it is "indexed" if the view is not index the only thing that gets replicated is the view definition.

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Hi Randy,

I am interested to know more about your second issue (timeout when modify a view). Could you give me more details on your issue? For example, what statement do you use to modify a view, what is the origional view definition and what is the error message?

Thanks,

Peng