Andrea Allred spams the “burn it down” button:
Replication is not my favorite, it is kind of far from my favorite. No further than that. Little further.
When it breaks, it can cause havoc and it always seems to break at the worst time. Recently we noticed that our logfile was massive (like 3 times the size of the database) and that was making many of the other processes painful. We didn’t know how long the log hadn’t been clearing so we got to burn it all (kind of).
The first thing I did was tell replication that we were done with all the transactions that had been committed.
I’d say about 40-50% of the pain of replication is in how difficult it is to troubleshoot. Transactional replication is an order of magnitude easier than merge replication, too, especially on systems of non-trivial size and scale. The single most common question I get is “When will this row be replicated to the other side?” I can’t answer that with merge replication. The second-most common question is, “Why are things slower right now than before?” Can’t answer that either…