FIX: SQL Server CE subscriptions may not be correctly marked as expired (313533)

MORE INFORMATION

Without this fix, you may encounter two types of problems when you synchronize a SQL Server CE subscriber:

• Data Divergence: Data divergence occurs when the subscriber and publisher are not synchronized. Without the fix, SQL Server CE subscribers may receive changes that are not synchronized (such as less rows than what exists at the publisher) with the publisher instead of being forced to reinitialize the subscription.
  
  -and-
  
  
• Conflicts Not Detected: The other scenario involves conflict detection between a subscriber and publisher. When you make updates in your SQL Server CE application, a subsequent synchronization may cause those updates to overwrite changes to the publisher without any conflict detected.
  
  Even with the fix, you should avoid any re-initialization of your SQL Server CE subscriber after the expiration period of the publisher if you use the bUploadBeforeReinit flag property for the subscription. Any re-initialization of the subscription without the bUploadBeforeReinit flag is safe to use regardless of the expiration period of the publication. If you use the bUploadBeforeReinit flag and reinitialize, you may encounter the same conflict detection problem as described earlier.
  
  

Cleanup of metadata is performed automatically as part of the synchronization of a SQL Server CE application. When a SQL Server CE application synchronizes, the stored procedure sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup is executed in the context of the published database to determine what metadata is safe to cleanup based on the retention period property of the publication. With the fix, you can either:

• Allow your SQL Server CE application to run a cleanup automatically (recommended approach).
  
  -or-
  
  
• Manually execute the cleanup procedure in the context of the published database. Manual execution of the cleanup procedure may be a consideration if you have used a retention period of 0 and now want to set the retention period to a certain frequency. This way, the time it takes to run the cleanup procedure does not affect the performance of SQL Server CE synchronization.
  
  

The sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup stored procedure is introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 1. Another stored procedure, sp_mergecleanupmetadata, has existed since the release of SQL Server 2000. Microsoft strongly discourages use of the sp_mergecleanupmetadata stored procedure if you have SQL Server CE subscribers. If you run the sp_mergecleanupmetadata stored procedure, you must reinitialize your SQL Server subscriber immediately.

REFERENCES

For more information and instructions on how to set up retention based metadata cleanup, refer to the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 2 Readme file.