Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

The MSrepl_commands Table

Each modification to a published table causes the Log Reader Agent to write at least one row to MSrepl_commands. Unlike snapshot replication, you can't simply cast the command column in MSrepl_commands as an nvarchar(512) and return human-readable text for transactional replication commands, so you'll want to use sp_browsereplcmds instead.

Understand that, just as a single T-SQL command may cause multiple entries to be written to the transaction log, so can a single T-SQL command cause the Log Reader Agent to write multiple entries to MSrepl_commands. If you have, say, a T-SQL UPDATE statement that affects 10,000 rows, you'll get at least 10,000 entries in MSrepl_commands. The same is true for DELETE commands—if a single ...