Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

The Merge Agent

When you are dealing with merge publications, the Merge Agent moves and reconciles incremental data changes that occur after the initial snapshot was created. Each merge publication has a Merge Agent that connects to the publishing server and the subscribing server and updates both as changes are made. In a full merge scenario, the agent first uploads all changes from the subscriber where the generation is 0 or greater than the last generation sent to the publisher. The agent gathers the rows in which changes were made, and the rows without conflicts are applied to the publishing database.

A conflict can arise when changes are made at both the publishing server and subscription server to a particular row(s) of data. A conflict ...