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Hard limitation for merge replication article count?

I am using merge replication in SQL 2012. I am looking here:

Scroll to the bottom and under the 'Replication Objects' it says that the maximum number of articles in a merge publication is 256.

I wasn't aware of this apparent limitation, but in the mean time I have been running merge replication with 456 articles and everything seems to run fine.

I found these 3 links about it:

So to summarise, apparently in SQL 2000 there was a bug which caused this limit. It was fixed in a service pack, but was reintroduced in SQL 2005.

Does that limitation still exist or not? There doesn't seem to be any official information about SQL 2012.

I would rather management studio tell me 'you cannot add more then 256 articles' rather than having to guess whether this will be a problem for us or not.

Community
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peter
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2 Answers2

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The first link you provided is official documentation for SQL Server 2012.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143432.aspx

The maximum number of articles supported in Merge Replication is 256. This means that Microsoft will ensure up to 256 articles will work as expected. I'm able to exceed 256 articles as well but I wouldn't do it in production. You may want to consider splitting this up into multiple publications for production purposes.

Brandon Williams
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I'm not convinced about the publication article limitation of 256. If we look here,

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlreplication/thread/f3f505ff-7a62-4131-badb-2ecf58f20808/

It is talking about a particular query that causes issues on SQL 2005 when you have more than 256 articles. First I ran the stored procedure sp_MSmakesystableviews.

It then generated a view called MSmerge_cont4F93AE6035D14E46ADA56D87F66E8962_90.

If I take the underlying query in the view it has more than 256 tables. I run that query against a SQL 2005 database and I get the error,

Message: Too many table names in the query. The maximum allowable is 256.

If I take that same query and run it on SQL 2012 it works fine.

My belief is that the MS documentation is outdated, and unless I find other issues with running merge replication with more than 256 articles I would have to take it that this limitation does not exist anymore from SQL2008 upward.

peter
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