Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Snapshot Replication

Snapshot replication makes an image of all the tables in a publication at a single moment in time and then moves that entire image to the subscribers. Little overhead on the server is incurred because snapshot replication does not track data modifications as the other forms of replication do. It is possible, however, for snapshot replication to require large amounts of network bandwidth, especially if the articles being replicated are large. Snapshot replication is the easiest form of replication to set up and is used primarily with smaller tables for which subscribers do not have to perform updates. An example of this might be a phone list that is to be replicated to many subscribers. This phone list is not considered to ...