Deepthi Gogrui pulls a fast one:
The scenario that I faced was little challenging. We had SQL Server 2012 production server replicating data to a Server 2000 which is used for reporting purposes. Subscriber SQL Server 2000 used by the reporting team were not ready to upgrade the Server as they need to rewrite their entire application as it was using vb6 code. They need a strategy where the data can still be replicated without upgrading the Server.
As I researched, I found that it is not compatible version but planned to test the replication to see if somehow it works. I tested the replication between SQL Server 2012 as a publisher and SQL Server 2000 as subscriber. I was able to setup the transactional replication between the servers for the database but found during the initial initialization snapshot, the ANSI_PADDING setting in the snapshot generated .sch files caused the issue while the distribution job runs.
Read on for the solution. This turned out to work despite Microsoft’s official guidance that they only support replication between SQL Server instances within two versions of each other.